Federico Pistono - Blog

In memory of Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot

Federico Pistono — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:35:02 +0000

In memory of Carl Sagan who would have turned 75 yesterday.

I've been re-watching Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and every time I feel this sense of awe and inspiration.

A great man, a true scientist, a visionary, and a somewhat too ahead of his time to be understood and appreciated fully. One of the greatest people that humanity had the privilege to have.

TH!NK2: Climate Change Round One Winners Announced

Federico Pistono — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:05:21 +0000

On November 4, 2009, the European Journalism Centre announced the TH!NK2: Climate Change Round One Winners. Each of the three winners for Round One of TH!NK2: Climate Change will receive a 500 Euro gift certificate to Amazon.com or a donation to a charity of the winner's choosing in the same amount.

QUALITY - Sinisa Boljanovic Black Point of the Danube Basin
MULTIMEDIA - Jodi Bush Waste not, Want not
IMPACT - Hemant Anant Jain Anyone for a revolution?

Two additional winners of the Honorary Video Award will receive a 250 Euro gift certificates to Amazon.com, or a donation to a charity of the winner's choosing in the same amount.

Christopher Mackey's "Even World-Renowned Educational Institutions Greenwash: Yale’s Becton Lab Wind Turbines"
Federico Pistono's (myself) "Th!nk About It Journal - Day Zero"

I would first like to say that I am honoured to be included among such great authors. As for the winners themselves, eventually it comes down to the way one personally feels about an article or a video. However, I think each one is somewhat objectively justified.

Sinisa was able to blend together a touching story and a detailed research, keeping the structure simple and the attention high throughout the whole post. The characteristics of a true journalist.

Jodi’s video was very simple, minimal. Sometimes you don’t need complex things to get the point across. Very effective in its simplicity.

As soon as I read Hemant’s post I knew he was going to win the impact category. I remember I even mentioned to Petrine a few days ago. It wasn’t difficult to see that coming. smile

Christopher used all what’s necessary for a good video. It has lights, editing, presence, screenplay and planning. Bravo.

As for me… well, it’s not up to me to judge.

I just think that there were many other posts that deserved as much as ours. And that makes very excited to be in this competition, regardless on how it’s going to end.

Thank you guys.

COP15 Priority number one

Federico Pistono — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:54:33 +0000

Between December 7 and December 18, 2009, the world leaders will meet up at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Copenhagen Call does not include water in the list of priorities, even though billions of people are affected by shortages of the most essential ingredient to life.

This is a call to action.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition, on Vimeo and on YouTube.

Internet speeds and costs around the World

Federico Pistono — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:51:22 +0000

Just a few days ago it was reported that Broadband internet access became a legal right in Finland. Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The Finnish people are also legally guaranteed a 100Mb broadband connection by the end of 2015.

I publish now this interesting graphics with the top 20 nations and their internet speed, penetration and cost. It is often said that (unrestricted) internet access is a good measurement for freedom and democracy. If so, then Italy and the USA are not in such a good shape.

In fact, it reflects our reality pretty well.

Th!nk about it Journal - Day Zero

Federico Pistono — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:25:37 +0000

During the three days of the kick-off event I shot quite a lot of footage, thanks to my trusty Creative Vado, which I carry around all the time, and the Flip Mino HD that they gave us. I was finally able to put some of the pieces together, just before the deadline of the first part f the competition. I know some of you are expecting something great... sorry to disappoint you, it isn't anything special. I decided to make a series of three videos, one for each day of the competition: Part Zero is the arrival, Part 1 is Bella Centre, and Part 2 is the Dyssekilde Ecovillage.

Most of you guys from the Th!nk about it kick-off event are featured on the video, I hope you'll enjoy it!

Th!nk about it Journal - Day Zero from Federico Pistono on Vimeo.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition, on Vimeo and on YouTube.

HDR series - city view

Federico Pistono — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:35:41 +0000

My first experiment with HDR photography. I know, it doesn't look that good. But it's my first try and and quite excited about the possibilities that this camera has to offer, I can't wait to learn more about the wonderful world of photography.

Camera: Canon Powershot SX1 IS.
Exposure: -2, 0, +2.

Would you buy a solar powered e-book reader?

Federico Pistono — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:24:07 +0000

Ever since e-books came out I wondered if I would ever switch to some kind of digital reader, replacing the old style paper and ink. E-books have so many advantages over normal paper: eco-friendly (no paper involved, no trees cut, no complex printing machinery, truck distribution with subsequent burning of oil, pollution and Co₂ emission, just to name a few), but t has its drawbacks. In Italian we say la carta puzza - paper smells, not meaning that it stinks (although it has a very particular smell), but that it has certain fascination, sense of home-made. Plus, it never runs out of batteries, it doesn't break very easily, it doesn't make your eyes hurt, it's easy to carry around, and sometimes it's the perfect present for a good friend.

When the kindle came out things changed. No backlit, which means you can only see when there is light, like the sun or a lamp, so it feels like reading a page from a newspaper or a book, the battery lasts for hours and it lets you navigate on the internet.

Randall Munroe, in his hilarious blag post (no misspell here, it's blag), described how an e-book like the kindle is actually more comfortable to read than a normal book. Although I still feel a personal attachment to the old fashioned paper, I like to feel the hard paper on my fingers, there's an environmental as well as logistic problem that needs to be addressed. I have no more space for books in my room. If I keep this rate of expansion, my books will literally bury me, unless I can find a bigger house.

E-readers would partially solve these two problems. Partially, because they still need energy to operate, and I already have enough electronic equipment floating around. I recently stumbled upon the new LG solar powered e-book reader, which features a 10 centimetre wide thin-film photovoltaic panel that can power the reader for a full day's worth of reading after 4-5 hours spent sitting in the sun. It sells for about 100 dollars. It's much cheaper than a Kindle and it's solar powered. I think I might finally try to switch to e-readers with this one.

So my question to all of you, fellow blogger and eager readers: would you buy a solar powered e-reader (not necessarily this model)?

I'm very curious of your reaction, in the meantime I shall post some of the hilarious comments on Slashdot:

... Warranty void if left out in the sun for prolonged exposure. (Romancer)

Now all I need is a portable sun to read in bed. (Rosco P. Coltrane)

Is it wrong to want an ebook with a little furnace to burn books as fuel? (Anonymous Coward)

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Climate Change - Priorities

Federico Pistono — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:12:32 +0000

This is my entry for the Blog Action Day 2009, my first experiment with Vector art and stick figures, I hope you like it!

p.s. Click on the image to see in full size.

p.p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Get ready: tomorrow is Blog Action Day

Federico Pistono — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:22:41 +0000

Dear fellow bloggers,
I hope you are ready, tomorrow is Blog Action Day!

Lots of blogs are taking part in Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change, including a few world-famous blogs like Mashable, the official Google blog, TMZ, Gadling, dozens of supporting organizations and thousands of others.

A quick look at the Google Blog Search gives us an interesting sample list:

The government of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which serves about 20 million people
Cherie Bender, a award-winning artist originally from Scotland
The DeSmogBlog Project, which has been voted Canada’s “Best Group Blog”
Woman Tribune, a community especially for women
The American School of Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Social Media Vision by Justin Williams
Going Crazy In America! – See the pledge below, it’s wonderful
World Vision – Love these guys!
Water Words That Work – A blog about water and how we can improve the environment by changing the way people think

Think about it, talk about it. The first step towards making people care is to inform them. And we, climate change bloggers, have live up to this task. Wouldn't it be awesome to see 90 posts from us, 90 bloggers, tomorrow?

If you need a place for inspiration take a look at the excellent BAD post: "8 Great Climate Change Resources for Your Blog Action Day Post", I found especially interesting the Pew Center for Global Climate Change’s “Facts and Figures” website, just the facts, pure and simple, and The Top 100 Effects of Global Warming, which gives also a funny look at the serious topic.

Oh, yes, also: get creative! Don't feel like you have to fill in this little box of advices, use the medium that suits you the best.

See you tomorrow!

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Th!nkCast #1 - Good evening, Copenhagen!

Federico Pistono — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:34:39 +0000

Th!nkCast #1 - Good evening, Copenhagen!
Published: Sunday 11 October
Host: Stephen Spillane

Podcasters

First episode: Good evening, Copenhagen!

The fourth out of many (hopefully) podcasts which relate to the Think about climate change blogging contest.

Description: How was the Copenhagen kick-off event? What was the highest point of the event and how did the bloggers react to the speakers?

This podcast was recoded on the first night of the actual conference, after the speakers at the Bella Centre gave their presentations. I remember having a great dinner at the Biomio (I don't know why they chose an Italian name for the restaurant, I guess good good and Italian sound-like name really go well together) when Joe Litobarski gathered all the people interested in making a podcast.

I previously had and experience with other podcasters and with Joe in the ThinkCast Special Edition #1: What has blogging ever done for us?, hosted by Domen Savič, in which Conor, Adela, Hai and myself, discussed about the power of blogging.

When Joe called us out that night it was very late, we all ate a drank quite a lot (I didn't really drink ant alcohol, but I stuffed with food), so we didn't expect a big response. We were pleasantly surprised. As far as I can remember about 20 people showed up, most of which were very passionate and gave a lot of interesting insights on how to record, what to talk about and the format of the podcast. Eventually we agreed on what a ThinkCast should look like, and this was our first result. On the Thinkcaster's group page there's a fervent discussion about the upcoming podcasts, which seem to be very interesting.

Happy listening! :D

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize -- Now Please Earn it!

Federico Pistono — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:40:46 +0000

I receive an email from Michael Moore yesterday, an open letter in response to the surprise announcement that Barack Obama's won the Nobel peace prize.

Dear President Obama,

How outstanding that you've been recognized today as a man of peace. Your swift, early pronouncements -- you will close Guantanamo, you will bring the troops home from Iraq, you want a nuclear weapon-free world, you admitted to the Iranians that we overthrew their democratically-elected president in 1953, you made that great speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, you've eliminated that useless term "The War on Terror," you've put an end to torture -- these have all made us and the rest of the world feel a bit more safe considering the disaster of the past eight years. In eight months you have done an about face and taken this country in a much more sane direction.

But...

The irony that you have been awarded this prize on the 2nd day of the ninth year of what is quickly becoming your War in Afghanistan is not lost on anyone. You are truly at a crossroads now. You can listen to the generals and expand the war (only to result in a far-too-predictable defeat) or you can declare Bush's Wars over, and bring all the troops home. Now. That's what a true man of peace would do.

There is nothing wrong with you doing what the last guy failed to do -- capture the man or men responsible for the mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11. BUT YOU CANNOT DO THAT WITH TANKS AND TROOPS. You are pursuing a criminal, not an army. You do not use a stick of dynamite to get rid of a mouse.

The Taliban is another matter. That is a problem for the people of Afghanistan to resolve -- just as we did in 1776, the French did in 1789, the Cubans did in 1959, the Nicaraguans did in 1979 and the people of East Berlin did in 1989. One thing is certain through all revolutions by people who wish to be free -- they ultimately have to bring about that freedom themselves. Others can be supportive, but freedom can not be delivered from the front seat of someone else's Humvee.

You have to end our involvement in Afghanistan now. If you don't, you'll have no choice but to return the prize to Oslo.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Your opposition has spent the morning attacking you for bringing such good will to this country. Why do they hate America so much? I get the feeling that if you found the cure for cancer this afternoon they'd be denouncing you for destroying free enterprise because cancer centers would have to close. There are those who say you've done nothing yet to deserve this award. As far as I'm concerned, the very fact that you've offered to walk into the minefield of hate and try to undo the irreparable damage the last president did is not only appreciated by me and millions of others, it is also an act of true bravery. That's why you got the prize. The whole world is depending on the U.S. -- and you -- to literally save this planet. Let's not let them down.

I agree. I think this prize was not given for what he did, but rather a smart political decision that urges him to take more action when it comes to end conflicts. That is, not just speeches and handshakes, but real action. Get the troops home, now, stop the nonsensical wars and occupations that the 2008, U.S. armed forces were stationed at more than 820 installations in at least 39 countries. Some of the largest contingents are the 142,000 military personnel in Iraq, the 56,200 in Germany, the 33,122 in Japan, 28,500 in Republic of Korea, 31,100 in Afghanistan and approximately 9,700 each in Italy and the United Kingdom. These numbers change frequently due to the regular recall and deployment of units..

Altogether, 84,488 military personnel are located in Europe, 154 in the former Soviet Union, 70,719 in East Asia and the Pacific, 7,850 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, 2,727 are in sub-Saharan Africa with 2,043 in the Western Hemisphere excepting the United States itself.

Mr. Obama, are you to stop this madness anytime soon?

There are thousands of people who deserve this prize more than him. But he's the one who has the most potential influence of changing the world for the better, and the Nobel committee just gave him a good reason not to disappoint the world, or else he will have to lose the face, return the prize and show himself as a man of war.

Let's just hope he will bring some of the change he was promising during the election.

HowTo batch convert Flip Mino and Creative Vado HD videos for Final Cut

Federico Pistono — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:27:12 +0000

The Creative Vado HD and the Flip Mino HD are great. A portable tiny device that records videos in HD (720p).

720p is not the full 1080 HD, but it's fairly good quality and more than enough for web usage, most of the websites only support so much (YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion). Imagine you would like to edit the footage, using a non linear video editing program such as iMovie, Premiere, Cinelerra or even better Final Cut Pro, there is immediately a problem: you can't get the footage work out of the box, some tweaking is required.

There are many ways to solve this issue and get usable working files, I will illustrate the most effective method I found, as well as the easiest.

download and install HandBrake, it works on Linux, OS X as well as Windows
open the video file and choose the following settings: MP4 file, no rescaling, average variable bitrate 7500 kbps
You can either add to queue or process the file by clicking start
Once you have to MP4 file, add it to you timeline and tell Final Cut to adjust the settings.

Once you've done that you'll be able to finally edit the file smoothly, you will just need to render the audio track, which takes a few seconds at maximum.

It is of course possible to open every single video with this method and convert all of your library. But if you have something like, I don't know, a thousand video files to convert, as I do, you might want to get smart.

Download and install HandBrakeCLI, the command line client for HandBrake and save in a directory in your $PATH (for example /usr/local/bin). Make sure you give the file the permission to execute. Suppose you downloaded the file in your Desktop, open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop *enter*
chmod +x HandBrakeCLI *enter*
sudo mv HandBrakeCLI /usr/local/bin *enter*
*insert password*  *enter*

*enter* of course doesn't mean to type *enter*, but to actually press the enter button on your keyboard. Next, create a file with the preferred text editor and save it as mp4fullhd.sh in you /usr/local/bin directory.

#!/bin/sh
for i in $@; do
  HandBrakeCLI -i $i -o $i.mp4  --preset="PS3" --vb 7500
done

OK, now the shell script is ready to run and do all this nasty job for you. Open a terminal and move to the directory where the video files are located (that could be easily done with the command cd /path/to/dir or even simply by dragging the directory in the terminal after the cd command) and type the following command:

mp4fullhd.sh *.AVI

This will convert all the AVI files in your directory to readable MP4 H254 encoded video file, with more or less the same quality. Launch the command and go out with your friends, or make some tea, it will take a while. :)

After you are done you can delete the original AVI or MP4 files, of course I suggest to always keep a backup somewhere else. Those who follow this blog closes may be asking themselves: "Why didn't he use mencoder?". In fact, I did, I have also a working version that uses mencoder and mplayer, but I wanted to make a guide that could be comprehensible and easily applicable also to those who don't have any experience with compiling and configuration.

That's all mates, this will hopefully save you a lot of time and allow you to edit in all tranquility.

Happy editing! >_<

Global warming just stopped: let’s all take a vacation!

Federico Pistono — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:41:36 +0000

Vitezslav Kremlik suggests that the temperatures over the last 10 years have actually stopped increasing, and that a cooling era is about to come. While I would very much like to agree with him and experience this phenomena (we could finally focus all of our attention on other issues, such as poverty, famine, AIDS, malaria, environmental pollution, waste management, fighting criminal organisations, soil degradation, biodiversity destruction, water shortage, et cetera), but sadly, the numbers I have are very different.

According to NASA and its "Global Temperature Trends: 2008 Annual Summation" from the "GISS Surface Temperature Analysis", 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 (left panel of Fig. 1) and the ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008.

Figure 1. Left: Annual-means of global-mean temperature anomaly Right: Global map of surface temperature anomalies, in degrees Celsius, for 2008. (Click for PDF.)

The solar output remains low at the lowest level in the period since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the time since the prior solar minimum is already 12 years, two years longer than the prior two cycles. This has led some people to speculate that we may be entering a "Maunder Minimum" situation, a period of reduced irradiance that could last for decades. Most solar physicists expect the irradiance to begin to pick up in the next several months — there are indications, from the polarity of the few recent sunspots, that the new cycle is beginning.

Figure 4. Solar irradiance through November 2008 from Frohlich and Lean. (Click for PDF.)

However, let's assume that the solar irradiance does not recover. In that case, the negative forcing, relative to the mean solar irradiance is equivalent to seven years of CO2 increase at current growth rates. So do not look for a new "Little Ice Age" in any case. Assuming that the solar irradiance begins to recover this year, as expected, there is still some effect on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record due to the unusually prolonged solar minimum. Because of the large thermal inertia of the ocean, the surface temperature response to the 10-12 year solar cycle lags the irradiance variation by 1-2 years. Thus, relative to the mean, i.e, the hypothetical case in which the sun had a constant average irradiance, actual solar irradiance will continue to provide a negative anomaly for the next 2-3 years.

Finally, the conclusions are unequivocal: the Southern Oscillation and increasing GHGs continue to be, respectively, the dominant factors affecting interannual and decadal temperature change. Solar irradiance has a non-negligible effect on global temperature. Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

Let us focus the attention on one particular sentence: "The Southern Oscillation and increasing GHGs continue to be, respectively, the dominant factors affecting interannual and decadal temperature change." This position and analysis is also confirmed by the 2008 report "Understanding and Responding to Climate Change".

Temperature readings from around the globe show a relatively rapid increase in surface temperature during the past century. These data, which have been
closely scrutinised and carefully calibrated to remove potential problems such as the
“urban heat island” effect, show an especially pronounced warming trend during the
past 30 years—in fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred during the
past decade.

Furthermore, the surface temperature data are consistent with other evidence of warming, such as increasing ocean temperatures, shrinking mountain glaciers, and decreasing polar ice cover. One inevitable question people ask is whether the current warming trend is unusual compared to temperature shifts on Earth prior to the 20th century—that is, before the build up of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. To help answer this question, scientists analyse tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, and a number of other “proxy” indicators to estimate past climatic conditions. These studies are important for understanding many aspects of Earth’s climate, including the natural variability of surface temperature over many centuries.

Indeed, it would be nice to take a vacation and believe whatever scepticism may arise today or tomorrow. But while we are here debating something that isn't even considered among scientists worth of debating, time is running out, and people are already experiencing the disastrous effects of climate change. It is important to debate, argue and challenge each other's ideas. But there are facts that we cannot ignore, that exist regardless of what we think or believe to be true, and we should take responsibility for those facts.

I shall try to focus my attention on the more constructive activity of trying to find solutions and get people involved, with all my heart and mind.

Tck tck tck... time is running, and I have to moral obligation to answer this wake up call. I hope you will too.

Peace.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Climate Change scepticism, science and reason

Federico Pistono — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:46:34 +0000

This is a post in response to Jodi's and Vitezslav's articles.

Jodi makes a valid point, that is, generally speaking. But I feel like she is missing something in the picture. While it is true that "continually re-examining the evidence can only ever strengthen our understanding of what we're dealing with", the reasons for being an outcast or a sceptic 30 years ago had profound scientific reasons.

The amount of data that we had was absolutely inadequate for the kind of research that we were trying to pursue. As more data comes in, you are more likely to reach a conclusion that is more likely to be true, or close enough. The kind of general relativism "We can all be wrong, you never know" and so on is partially true, but it fails to consider the actual evidence in face of a scientific and cultural revolution.

Consider the birth of quantum mechanics. When Werner Heisenberg proposed the "uncertainty principle", that is, it's impossible to measure simultaneously both position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty, it had profound implications for such fundamental notions as causality and the determination of the future behaviour of an atomic particle.

Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle in, ironically, the Niels Bohr's institute at Copenhagen, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.

This seemingly harmless sounding statement had even more profound scientific and philosophical implications. Albert Einstein was repelled by the idea that the universe was non deterministic, and he spent much of his late years trying to disprove quantum theory. He firmly stood by the idea that randomness is a reflection of our ignorance of some fundamental property of reality, while Niels Bohr's posistion was that the probability distributions are fundamental and irreducible, and depend on which measurements we choose to perform. Einstein and Bohr debated the uncertainty principle for many years.

Today, most physicists accept the laws of quantum mechanics as an accurate description of the subatomic world. And certainly it was a thorough understanding of these new laws which helped Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invent the transistor.

In short, Einstein and all the other sceptics were wrong, and all the observational evidence that we collected points to the direction of quantum theory. There may be a few sceptics, but nobody would dream of going back to Newtonian mechanics, they would most likely formulate a third theory, a new idea. Progress, not regress.

Science evolves, it ameliorates its tools for measuring and its knowledge of the physical world. The amount of data that was collected in the 70's regarding our climate, the models and the simulations were extremely poor. Now we have a multitude of data coming from multiple sources, including satellites, powerful computers and complex algorithms that can predict with a certain degree of accuracy the near future.

In other words, we held a position like a religious belief when we were completely ignorant, now we have a little more knowledge and we can discard old dogmas and opinions in favour of observational science and probabilistic predictions.

If you don't have to time/will to read the extensive scientific research in support of the current climate change theory, I suggest you watch this wonderful series of documentaries by Iain Simpson Stewart, a Scottish geologist, Professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth, and produced by the BBC entitled "Earth: The Climate Wars" (thanks to TDF for the following description).

Episode 1 – The Battle Begins

In the 1970s the world seemed to be falling apart. From acid rain to overpopulation, ecological concerns were at the fore. And it was at this time that climate change first became a hot political issue. But it wasn’t global warming that frightened scientists, it was the complete opposite; a new ice age.Dr Iain Stewart traces the history of climate change from its very beginning and examines just how the scientific community managed to get it so very wrong back in the Seventies. Along the way he uncovers some of the great unsung heroes of climate change science, and introduces us to a secret organisation of American government scientists, known as Jason, who wrote the first official report on global warming as far back as 1979.He shows how – by the late 1980s – global warming had already become a serious political issue. It looked as if the world was uniting to take action. But it turned out to be a false dawn. Because in the 1990s global warming would be transformed into one of the biggest scientific controversies of our age.

Episode 2 – Fightback

Dr Iain Stewart investigates the counter attack that was launched by the global warming sceptics in the 1990s. At the start of the 1990s it seemed the world was united. At the Rio Earth summit the world signed up to a programme of action to start tackling climate change. Even George Bush was there. But the consensus didn’t last.Iain examines the scientific arguments that developed as the global warming sceptics took on the climate change consensus. The sceptics attacked almost everything that scientists held to be true. They argued that the planet wasn’t warming up, that even if it was it was nothing unusual, and certainly whatever was happening to the climate was nothing to do with human emissions of greenhouse gases.Iain interviews some of the key global warming sceptics, and discovers how their positions have changed over time.

Episode 3 – New Challenges

Having explained the science behind global warming, and addressed the arguments of the climate change sceptics earlier in the series, in this third and final part Dr Iain Stewart looks at the biggest challenge now facing climate scientists. Just how can they predict exactly what changes global warming will bring? It’s a journey that takes him from early attempts to model the climate system with dishpans, to supercomputers, and to the frontline of climate research today: Greenland. Most worryingly he discovers that scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that their models are actually underestimating the speed of changes already underway.

As for Vitezslav's remark:

Later, in reply to my question, he also said, that climate sceptic scientists are "flat earthers" and it is a waste of time to have an "open discussion" with madmen.

[...]

So first they invite us, they pay a hotel, airplane and food for us. It costs thousands of EUR. We fly here from all parts of the world. To an event called "Think about it". And then we are told "NOT TO think about it". So now I am not sure what to do. Should I use my head or not? Advise me.

[...]

Maybe most scientists really do believe so (I doubt it), but it is just a belief. They do not have the evidence. Not yet. You may think, that "we must act fast, we cannot wait for the scientific evidence". OK, but then you cannot say it is a "science based policy", can you? And there is no reason to ridicule sceptics as flat earthers and say the matter is "closed".

I'm very much curious of his position. He says that many scientists hold their beliefs on human caused climate change, that there is no clear evidence and that after all, it's just a belief.

It could not be farther away from the truth.

Real scientists do no hold any belief. They observe something, and by following the scientific process they know something is likely to be true, or accurate. That is, until new evidence and/or a new consistent theory emerges, which refines or discards the old theory.

From what I understand he wants to put the emphasis on the effect that solar radiations may have on our climate, specifically to various solar cycles that seem to occur overy few years.

According to the excellent guide: "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming" there a five stages of denials, each one of them having several subsections. Vitezslav seems to be at number 1.a.

However, to be fair, he does point out the Suess and Hallstadtzeit cycle, a few of the cyclic changes in behaviour of the Sun. Many possible patterns have been suggested. Interestingly, only the 11 (Schwabe) and 22 year (Hale cycle) cycles are clear in the observations. The Gleissberg, Suess, Hallstatt, and the Xapsos-Burke cycle are still in the realm of what Vitezslav himself would call "belief", since there is no clear observational evidence.

The climate sceptic guide, however, helps us again:

It's true that the earth is warmed, for all practical purposes, entirely by solar radiation, so if the temperature is going up or down, the sun is a reasonable place to seek the cause.

Turns out it's more complicated than one might think to detect and measure changes in the amount or type of sunshine reaching the earth. Detectors on the ground are susceptible to all kinds of interference from the atmosphere -- after all, one cloud passing overhead can cause a shiver on an otherwise warm day, but not because the sun itself changed. The best way to detect changes in the output of the sun -- versus changes in the radiation reaching the earth's surface through clouds, smoke, dust, or pollution -- is by taking readings from space.

This is a job for satellites. According to PMOD at the World Radiation Center there has been no increase in solar irradiance since at least 1978, when satellite observations began. This means that for the last thirty years, while the temperature has been rising fastest, the sun has not changed.

There has been work done reconstructing the solar irradiance record over the last century, before satellites were available. According to the Max Planck Institute, where this work is being done, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since around 1940.

This reconstruction does show an increase in the first part of the 20th century, which coincides with the warming from around 1900 until the 1940s. It's not enough to explain all the warming from those years, but it is responsible for a large portion. See this chart of observed temperature, modelled temperature, and variations in the major forcings that contributed to 20th century climate.

RealClimate has a couple of detailed discussions on what we can conclude about solar forcing and how science reached those conclusions. Read them here and here.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Google Earth launches nifty features in Climate Change simulator

Federico Pistono — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:45:11 +0000

Google has announced on its official blog that it has developed some very interesting new features of Google Earth to coincide with the Copenhagen climate conference, which, as we all know, is only a matter of weeks away.

In December of this year, representatives from nations around the globe will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global agreement on climate change. The objective is to reduce global warming emissions sufficiently in order to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change and to support the global community in adapting to the unavoidable changes ahead. Denmark will act as host for this fifteenth Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, known as COP15.

In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!

Together with the Danish government, we're also launching our YouTube COP15 channel. On the channel, you can submit your thoughts and questions on climate change to decision-makers and the world through an initiative called "Raise Your Voice." These videos will be broadcast on screens around the conference in December and rated by viewers of the channel. The top-rated contributions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN/YouTube debate on December 15th, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen. We look forward to seeing your videos!

You can see the tours directly on your browser by installing the plugins, which I did. It's interesting to finally have a visual representation what you can navigate through of of any location on earth up till the year 2100, that is, according to both the IPCC's high and low emissions scenarios. Still, it's the best we have to offer, and it's reasonable to assume that these prediction, though not 100% accurate, might be not so far from the truth.

The most interesting part of this project is, in my humble opinion, not the apocalyptic scenarios of places submerged underwater, million of refugees and glaciers melting, but rather the possible tangible and concrete solution that we can adopt to solve the problem and avoid these scenarios in the first place. There's a whole section dedicated to this purpose, and according to Google, more to come.

I embedded the whole playlist of the "Google Earth tours for COP15 tours", which i think will be automatically updated once these videos grow. As The Guardian suggests, it would be nice, too, if the crowd-sourcing potential of Google Maps could somehow be exploited by users. What additional layers of information would you like to see? Predicted impacts on habitats? Likely spread of malaria endemic areas? Data showing variations in public attitudes to the threat of climate change? Regional increases (and decreases) in human population? The location of existing and planned nuclear power stations? Over to you.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Happy Earth Overshoot Day!

Federico Pistono — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:27:09 +0000

Let us all rejoice: yesterday it was Earth Overshoot Day!

What is Earth Overshoot Day?

You may be asking what it it. The Global Footprint Network will help me elucidate this concept. Also called "Ecological Debt Day", it marks an unfortunate milestone: the day when humanity begins living beyond its ecological means. Beyond that day, we move into the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, utilising resources at a rate faster than what the planet can regenerate in a calendar year.

Globally, we now require the equivalent of 1.4 planets to support our lifestyles. Put another way, in less than 10 months, humanity used ecological services it takes 12 months for the Earth to regenerate.

Of course, we only have one Earth. The fact that we are using (or “spending” natural capital) faster than it can replenish is similar to having expenditures that continually exceed income. In planetary terms, the results of our ecological overspending are becoming more clear by the day. Climate change – a result of carbon being emitted faster than it can be reabsorbed by the forests and seas – is the most obvious and arguably pressing result. But there are others as well: shrinking forests, species loss, fisheries collapse and freshwater stress to name a few.

What is Overshoot?

Just like any company, nature has a budget -- it can only produce so many resources and absorb so much waste every year. The problem is, our demand for nature's services is exceeding what it can provide.

In 2009, humanity is projected to use about 40 percent more than nature can regenerate this year. This problem -- using resources faster than they can regenerate and creating waste such as CO2 faster than it can be absorbed -- is called ecological overshoot.

We currently maintain this overshoot by liquidating the planet’s natural resources. For example we can cut trees faster than they re-grow, and catch fish at a rate faster than they repopulate. While this can be done for a short while, overshoot ultimately leads to the depletion of resources on which our economy depends.

Humanity first went into overshoot in 1986; before that time the global community consumed resources and produced carbon dioxide at a rate consistent with what the planet could produce and reabsorb. By 1996, however, humanity was using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply, with Earth Overshoot Day falling in November. This year, more than two decades since we first went into overshoot, because we are now demanding resources at a rate of 40 percent faster than the planet can produce them.

In 2008, Earth Overshoot Day was reached on September 23.

How is Earth Overshoot Day Calculated?

[ world biocapacity / world Ecological Footprint ] x 365 = Earth Overshoot Day Day

Put simply, Earth Overshoot Day shows the day on which our total Ecological Footprint (measured in global hectares) is equal to the biocapacity (also measured in global hectares) that nature can regenerate in that year. For the rest of the year, we are accumulating debt by depleting our natural capital and letting waste accumulate.

The day of the year on which humanity enters into overshoot and begins adding to our ecological debt is calculated by calculating the ratio of global available biocapacity to global Ecological Footprint and multiplying by 365. From this, we find the number of days of demand that the biosphere could supply, and the number of days we operate in overshoot.

This ratio shows that in 2009, in just 268 days, we demanded the biosphere’s entire capacity for the year. The 267th day of the year is September 25.

A word from the expert

Here's a skype interview made by Beppe Grillo with Mathis Wackernagel, a Swiss-born sustainability advocate, currently Executive Director for Global Footprint Network, an Oakland, California-based non-profit that focuses on developing and promoting metrics for sustainability. He created the concept ecological footprint concept and this video he speaks his mind, presenting the problems from a general overview and then bringing us real world examples o follow. What he advocates... I don't know, it just makes a lot of sense. Please take a look.

Call for action to all blogger: it's time to act!

Right, let's get moving! First, I need to know what my ecological footprint is (roughly). Let's take test at the footprint calculator and find out (Switzerland should be close enough to Italy, as Wackernagel suggests). Here we go:

According to the 2008 data table of the Global Footprint Network, in order to support my lifestyle, it takes about 4 global hectares of the Earth's productive area. Switzerland's ecological footprint per capita is 5, Italy's 4.7, The United States of America top the list with 9.4 and Haiti is at the bottom with 0.5. Even though I'm living much below the national average, and my impact on climate could be compared to the typical Polish, Turkmen, or Belarusian person, if everyone consumed like me, we would still need 1.9 planet Earths.

That is indeed a bit disappointing, especially when considering that I try to live the most environmentally protective and sustainable life I can: buy local food, avoid useless junk that I would throw away immediately, don't buy newspapers, move by bicycle and bus, do car sharing whenever possible, don't waste energy in the house, eat less meat and (most of) all that.

It's not easy to be environmentally friendly, that is, be coherent with what I advocate and still live my life (a dedicated post is on the way).

What can you do to help (short version)

Even though the future does not look very bright, it's not a good reason to avoid taking action and do whatever we can. What matters the most is our will to change things for the better, and while trying to be more effective as possible, things will eventually change. Technology improves, and human ingenuity is the greatest resource that we have on our side. If we really focus on this issue, our collective intelligence and efforts may actually be able to make the difference. If not, then in means we were bound to fail, ad the human species deserves to be wiped out of the species, as a malevolent parasite. Or maybe not. Either way, I think it's worth trying.

I'm building an (almost) comprehensive list of tips to follow when trying to be more effective on limiting climate change. He's a very general list, just to start off:

Cut down on driving. Bicycles, walking, or using public transportation are good alternatives.

Reduce energy consumption. This can include, but is not limited to:

Turning off lights in rooms you are not occupying.
Unplug unused electronics and appliances.
Whenever possible, try to substitute goods that use energy derived from fossil fuel-based production, for goods produced from cleaner sources of energy, such as solar or wind.
Consider both the long-term and short-term consequences of purchasing a product. Though the short-term consequences of purchasing and using that product may be minor, justifying the purchase of the product, the long-term, such as length of time for that item to decompose, may be severe, outweighing the benefits of such a purchase.
Incorporate the natural environment with your home environment. Many architectural methods now exist that take advantage of benefits created by the environment while preserving it as well. While, the short-term costs of implementing these methods are currently generally higher than implementing environmentally-damaging ones, the long-term benefits typically balance or exceed the costs. As technology in the field of environmental studies progresses, such “environmentally-friendly” construction methods are expected to become cheaper.
Help restore the environment. In your free time, help plant a tree or volunteer to help clean up a watershed area. Earth’s environment is composed of complex relationships, many not fully understood by ecologists and biologists. One of the best ways to reduce our Ecological Debt is to help restore the Earth’s biocapacity as much as possible.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

Federico Pistono — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:50:02 +0000

The blogosphere is a complex organism which evolves rapidly in an ever-increasing motion. Discussions, philosophical insights, political commentaries, idiotic videos and lolcats cross each other in an apparently incoherent flow of information, unstoppable and uncontrollable. Then suddenly something extraordinary happens. On October 15 of each year the minds and hearts of the bloggers and internauts are captured by one word. Since its first edition in 2007 Blog Action Day has gathered the attention of thousands of bloggers, who were able to then reach millions of people. The idea is very simple as well as effective:

One issue, one day, thousands of voices

Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple, clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently.

I participated in both the events and gave my contribution. In the October 15 post "Blog Action Day - Zero Waste" with a post about the environment, I presented a series posters which encouraged people to recycle materials, which could then be used for future products, instead of considering them just waste. Recycling is of course just the last link of the chain, as people should first reduce and then reuse materials as much as possible. The cycle of production, consumption and disposal is a fairly complex issue, and it can't be explained in a few paragraphs, and many organisations have tied to find viable solutions to solve this problem. As far as I could tell, one organisation above all has its ideas and projects very clear and effective: the Zero Waste International Alliance. They have projects, publications, as well as real life case studies. So, what does the environment and the production of materials have to do with climate change? Quite a lot. What we decide to buy inevitably has an impact on the planet. Things are very much connected, soil degradation and the destruction of biodiversity do not allow plant to flourish, which cannot then absorb CO₂, nor purify water, nor provide oxygen and nutrients for the organisms that need it.

The second year the topic was poverty.

I decided to take the discussion on a different level. I was in a Starbucks in Chicago, looking at the teacup. According to that paper-cup I was helping poor people in Africa by consuming at Starbucks. That seemed very much unlikely. Just before getting in the building I saw an homeless man, sitting in the sidewalk, begging for change, and it made me think of what poverty actually means. I wrote an article about the idea of poverty, and a critique of the GDP.

Finally, this year's edition. I received an email from the blogactionday staff, asking me to fill in a survey and give my take on what should the 2009 topic be.

Although they were different topics, it seems to me that in reality they are were much connected. I made my choice, and, not surprisingly, I received another email just a few days later:

We're thrilled to announce that after receiving more than 10,000 votes from past
Blog Action Day participants, the issue overwhelmingly voted as the topic for Blog
Action Day 2009 is... Climate Change!

Well, what-do-you-know? Climate change is the hot topic, and the bloggers' awareness is very high. I wasn't surprised at all, it makes sense after all, but I was kind of surprised that maybe for the first time the blogosphere's interest and the media's interest, as well as the politician's finally coincide. I was actually relieved: the time to speak up is now. Talk about it, think about it, spread the word and hopefully DO something about it.

Needless to say, I invite all of you to participate to this worldwide event, on October 15. Register, take a badge and put it on you blog, write about it, tweet #BAD09.

Peace.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition

Italian TV stupid as usual, Muse pwn it!

Federico Pistono — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:37:52 +0000

The British band Muse were invited to perform their last single, "Uprising" form the ambum "the Resistance" on the Italian TV show "Quelli Che Il Calcio". Muse were told they'd have to lip-sync. So, Matt Bellamy switched places with drummer Dominic Howard, and bassist Christopher Wolstenholme "played" guitar and keys. Then lead singer Dom was interviewed, he referred to "the drummer" several times, as if he was just an anonymous guy in the band, the brainless presenter Simona Ventura of course did not realise anything that was happening.

The perfect way to get a revenge over these idiots. Oh yes, we do love Italy, but not its TV.

Thesis: Open Source implementations of encoding algorithms for video distribution in the HTML5 era

Federico Pistono — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:42:16 +0000

I finally finished and presented my thesis. I'm releasing the work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike Works 3.0 license.

Abstract

This dissertation will cover the basics of video encoding and distribution over TCP/IP, focusing on Open Source technologies and the future prospects of podcasting and video fruition in general. Particular attention will be given to the state of the art technology (MPEG-4 Part 10 specifications) and the new possibilities of HTML5 and the integration of the patent-free video codec Ogg Theora.

Downloads

10:10 reduce your carbon emissions by (at least) 10% in 2010

Federico Pistono — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:00:15 +0000

I recently joined in the 10:10 campaign, which aims to reduce each person's carbon emissions by (at least) 10% in 2010. Using Ian Katz' words, the 10:10 campaign is "the world's response to global warming is a classic case of all mouth and no trousers. This new initiative aims to show that we can all act now - and achieve something significant". It may seem, at first sight, just a fancy trend to follow up, since in these days it's cool to be green, celebrities, public figures, businessman, actors, suddenly everyone wants to go green and they take the pledge.

Sure, it may seem like that, but only to people who do it for the wrong reasons. Personally, I think it's a reasonable pledge, a moral obligation, give the current state of things. But that's my point of view. Even so, does it really matter the reason for which people decide to take the pledge? After all, humans are not very known for being capable of consciously deciding for themselves. People tend to follow trends and advertisements. Climate change is a serious issue, possibly the most important problem that our species has ever had to face, and it would be desirable to have everyone involved with the same passion and conscious choice. It would be nice indeed, but we cannot expect that happen, nor can we know if someone is truly devoted or if they are just following the mass.

As of now, I don't really care, nor do I pretend to know which one is it. It's good enough that people well do something tangible in the right direction, then we'll work on the rest.

A few links and resources to help you out in this journey:

an excellent list on how to reduce your carbon emissions, compiled by the guardian, the most comprehensive one I found so far.
print off flyer to stick on your fridge as a check-list reminder

Quentin Tarantino's list of top 20 films from 1992 (mine too)

Federico Pistono — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:38:03 +0000

From YouTube.

Here’s director Quentin Tarantino's list of top 20 films from 1992 to the present. These are the films that he admires the most, since he became a director. I used the following notation: English name (Original name, year), by Director.

His indisputable number one is

Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000), by Kinji Fukasaku

Then the list goes on alphabetical order, since he can't exactly decide which one comes first (I feel the same way).

Anything Else (2003), by Woody Allen
Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), by Takashi Miike
The Blade (Dao, 1995), by Hark Tsui
Boogie Nights (1997), by Paul Thomas Anderson
Dazed and Confused (1993), by Richard Linklater
Dogville (2003), by Lars Von Tries
Fight Club (1999), by David Fincher
Friday (1995), by F. Gary Gray
The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), by Joon-ho Bong
The Insider (1999), by Michael Mann
Joint Security Area (Gongdong gyeongbi guyeok JSA, 2000), by Chan-wook Park
Lost In Translation (2003), by Sofia Coppola
The Matrix (1999), by Larry and Andy Wachowski
Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok, 2003), by Joon-ho Bong
Police Story 3 (Ging chat goo si 3: Chiu kup ging chat, 1992), by Stanley Tong
Shaun of the Dead (2004), by Edgar Wright
Speed (1994), by Jan de Bont
Team America: World Police (2004), by Trey Parker
Unbreakable (2000), by M. Night Shyamalan

I find myself very much in touch with Tarantino, although he focuses more on action films, whereas I privilege cyberpunk and animation, we share the same love for Japanese and Korean cinema, as well as pulp films. Also, I noticed that we like the same directors, but different films. By looking at my IMDB vitong history I was able to make my personal top 20. Again, I've got the same problem he had, hence the list is in no particular order. I've put in bold the film/directors that appear in both lists. The list only includes feature films since 1992: no short films, no documentaries, no series.

Waking Life (2001), by Richard Linklater
The Matrix (1999), by Larry and Andy Wachowski
Haze (2005), by Shinya Tsukamoto
Pi (1998), by Darren Aronofsky
Unbreakable (2000), by M. Night Shyamalan
Twelve Monkeys (1995), by Terry Gilliam
There Will Be Blood (2007), by Paul Thomas Anderson
Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti, 1996), by Jan Svankmajer
Sin City (2005), by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino (special guest director)
Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001), by Hayao Miyazaki
A snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi, 2002), by Shinya Tsukamoto
Reservoir Dogs (1992), by Quentin Tarantino
Requiem for a Dream (2000), by Darren Aronofsky
Pulp Fiction (1994), by Quentin Tarantino
Oldboy (2003), Chan-wook Park
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime, 1997), by Hayao Miyazaki
Fight Club (1999), by David Fincher
Donnie Darko (2001), by Richard Kelly
Clerks (1994), by Kevin Smith
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom, 2003), by Ki-duk Kim

Given that he could not credit himself, and that I three of his films appear on my list, we have almost 80% compatibility in terms of films and directors.

In the future, I hope I will be to write a critique of each of the above.

ThinkCast - TH!NK2 about it Climate Change podcast: What has blogging ever done for us?

Federico Pistono — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:44:05 +0000

Th!nkCast - Special Edition #1
Published: Monday 24 August
Host: Domen Savič

Podcasters

Domen Savič
Conor Slowey
Adela
Hai Nguyen Van
Federico Pistono

First episode: What has blogging ever done for us?

Description: Weblogs or blogs are slowly turning into an oldie but goldie phenomenon of the web 2.0. Still, all across the globe people are finding new ways to use this wonderful tool for several types of communication. Be it for forming a political movement to investigating climate change! So, what has blogging ever done for us?

We recorded the first of three "special editions" of the Th!nkCast, which will be released before the Copenhagen event. Also, there will be a "Launch Event" podcast recorded at Copenhagen. We'll be talking about the podcast at Copenhagen, and debating where we want to take it. We really want it to be a community podcast, with everybody free to become involved.

Who's afraid of Drupal? New Drupal Video Podcast for beginners

Federico Pistono — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:25:57 +0000

I've been working with a colleague for quite some time, we're both Drupal enthusiasts, and we decided to experiment on the creation of a video podcast for Drupal beginners.

Today we present you the result of this experiment:

Who's afraid of Drupal? Episode 0: Introduction to Drupal

http://www.whosafraidofdrupal.com

Video Podcast (iPhone compatible):
http://feeds.feedburner.com/drupal_en

The Podcast is available in both English and Italian.

Hope you like it, we would love to get some feedback! ^_^

Social media revolution

Federico Pistono — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:53:33 +0000

TH!NK2 Climate Change - I'm going to Copenhagen!

Federico Pistono — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:11:25 +0000

I am delighted to announce that I was selected as one of the 81 bloggers in the world that will take part to the 2009 TH!NK2 Climate Change blogging competition.

TH!NK2 Climate Change is a 3 month blogging competition with a focus on UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December 2009. 81 bloggers from Europe with featured guests from India, China Brazil and the USA, representing the world's biggest players in climate policy, will come together on the European Journalism Centre's thinkaboutit.eu platform, to exchange ideas and debate the issues of climate change.

Participants are encouraged to report about stories in their own back yards; to bring out the local side of a global issue. The aim is to create a portal into the minds of 81 people, to show how each one experiences the effects of Climate Change policies every day.

To launch TH!NK2, TH!NKers head to Copenhagen! The FREE trip to Copenhagen takes place the 21-22 September and all participants must attend to be eligible as a TH!NKer. In Copenhagen, The EJC arms ALL particpants with a Flip HD to help them include multimedia content to their blog posts.

It is organised by the European Journalism Centre, the travel expense and accommodation will be covered by the EJC.

I am expected to write blog posts for the competition from 23 September to 20 December 2009. To stay in the competition, I need to submit at least 3 posts per month. Not a problem, it sounds much more like an incentive.

I am excited to be part of this project and I can't wait to start blogging from Denmark. ^_^

Silvio Berlusconi: ten more [than fair] questions

Federico Pistono — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:09:37 +0000

The private and public behaviour of Italy’s prime minister is under intense scrutiny. A leading Italian newspaper has asked him for an explanation. Geoff Andrews adds to its list of queries with ten of his own.

Dear Signor Berlusconi,

It is now nearly three weeks since La Repubblica published its list of ten questions in connection with your relationship to Noemi Letizia. You have chosen not to answer their questions, claiming that the newspaper's initiative was part of a campaign organised by the left. In the weeks since, you have accused La Repubblica of orchestrating a left-wing plot that has extended to the international press, drawing in the Times and the Economist, amongst others. In this period you have also described the Italian parliament as "useless" and judges as being fuelled by "hatred" and "jealousy".

It is now only days before the European elections to be held across the European Union's member-states on 4-7 June 2009, with Italy's on 6-7 June; these will be followed by Italy's hosting of the G8 summit in L'Aquila on 8-10 July. Your response has once again raised questions of wider public interest over your performance as Italian prime minister. I would like to put these further ten questions to you now.

1) You have made many criticisms of the role of the press in this case, despite the fact that Il Giornale (a paper owned by your family), as well as other newspapers, have regularly defended your conduct. Few prime ministers have that privilege, yet you persist in saying that the press is against you. What is your understanding, then, of a free press? For example, would you put any conditions on criticisms the press may make of the prime minister?

2) You accused La Repubblica of "exploiting private matters for political ends". Yet, the "public" and "private" boundaries often overlap in your political life, notably through your own vast private ownership of daily newspapers and several TV stations, while you simultaneously wield political power. You agreed to resolve this "conflict of interests" within 100 days of taking office, yet nothing has been done. There are wide criticisms of this situation throughout Europe. Why have you not resolved this "conflict of interests" and do you not think it presents a problem for Italian democracy?

3) On 21 May 2009, you described the Italian parliament as "useless", suggesting that only 100 MPs were needed to get the work done. At the same time, you claim that the Italian people are "with you". Is your view, then, that the Italian electorate would happily give you more power to "get things done" more efficiently?

4) You have compared the role of government to that of a private company, and contrasted legislators unfavourably with entrepreneurs. Do you understand the difference between being a successful salesman and a successful statesman?

5) On 19 May, an Italian court ruled that you had bribed your British lawyer, David Mills, by paying $600,000 to give false testimony on your behalf. Mills was convicted in February, though you have been protected by parliamentary-immunity legislation passed by your government. You have said that you will be making a statement to parliament on the matter "as soon as you have time", but not before the European elections. Why is that and when will the statement be made?

6) In addition to your criticisms of the Italian parliament, you regularly attack Italian judges for their bias and "insanity". You have recently faced criticism for undermining constitutional procedures, leading to conflict with the president of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, most recently in the right-to-die case of Eluana Englaro. It has been claimed that you yourself have high aspirations to succeed Napolitano. Can you confirm your intention to become president of the republic and what would you bring to the role?

7) In July 2009 you will be hosting a G8 summit in L'Aquila. At previous summits and international gatherings of world leaders, you have had some communication problems with some of your peers. Do you envisage any more this year?

8) What, in your view, are your greatest achievements as Italian prime minister?

9) During the last few weeks you have denied being directly involved in the selection of TV showgirls as parliamentary candidates for your party, even though your own newspaper Il Giornale has admitted as much. Can you clarify whether you have or you have not?

10) Finally, why does Noemi Letizia, your 18-year-old friend in Naples, call you "Papi"?

Yours sincerely,

Geoff Andrews

From OpenDemocracy.

The blog gets facelift and upgrade: drupal 6.12 and facebook connect

Federico Pistono — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:43:09 +0000

Good news everyone! I took some time to make this blog a little bit more usable, as well as safe. I made quite a lot of improvements, here's a list of the most significant ones.

Dupal 6.12

I've been running Drupal 5 for quite some time, and I've meaning to upgrade to Drupal 6 (version 12) since I had the chance to work with it and see the huge improvements the community has made to this amazing Open Source Project. It's now faster to load, better looking (improved theming), more secure, easier to use, supports OpenID in its core, and a lot of other small goodies that make it irresistible. It's the most important update, as well as the least noticeable by the end user.

Facebook Connect

See that nice facebook icon, just down the login form? This module allows you to login on my blog using your Facebook login and password. Sweet.

After logging through Facebook Connect, you can create a local account
You can choose which of your Facebook public information you want to import and synchronize with your local account, following Facebook Connect API Terms of use
You can see which of your Facebook friends already have an account on this blog
You can publish a customizable message on your Facebook feed announcing that your have created an account here
You can invite your Facebook friends to create an account here

For this purpose I'm using the excellent Facebook Connect drupal module.

Quicktabs and AJAX sidebar blocks

Nothing really special, but it improved the readability of the blog. Eveything is more handy and clear. I hope you like it.

Let me know what you think. ^_^

When pigs fly: the death of Oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide

Federico Pistono — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:37:13 +0000

I've been meaning to write a serious article the RIAA, the music industry, and their futile and utterly nonsensical war against the music fans. I regularly read torrentfreak, the Creative Commons blog and i followed very closely the Nine Inch Nails new business model. I finally found an almost exhaustive article that I can say it fairly represents the past, the present and the future of the music industry as we know it. A slow and painful death, with the record labels burning to the ground, and we'll all dance around the fire, in feast.

This is a copy of the original article "When pigs fly: the death of Oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide" by Demonbaby, a.k.a. Rob Sheridan, Nine Inch Nails' art director, photographer, and video editor.

[Currently Listening To: Music I Didn't Pay For]

For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.

For the past eight years, I've worked on and off with major record labels as a designer ("Major" is an important distinction here, because major labels are an entirely different beast than many indie labels - they're the ones with the power, and they are the ones driving the industry-wide push against piracy). It was 1999 when I got my first taste of the inner-workings of a major record label - I was a young college student, and the inside of a New York label office seemed so vast and exciting. Dozens of worker bees hummed away at their desks on phones and computers. Music posters and stacks of CDs littered every surface. Everyone seemed to have an assistant, and the assistants had assistants, and you couldn't help but wonder "what the hell do all these people do?" I tagged along on $1500 artist dinners paid for by the labels. Massive bar tabs were regularly signed away by record label employees with company cards. You got used to people billing as many expenses back to the record company as they could. I met the type of jive, middle-aged, blazer-wearing, coke-snorting, cartoon character label bigwigs who you'd think were too cliche to exist outside the confines of Spinal Tap. It was all strange and exciting, but one thing that always resonated with me was the sheer volume of money that seemed to be spent without any great deal of concern. Whether it was excessive production budgets or "business lunches" that had nothing to do with business, one of my first reactions to it all was, "so this is why CDs cost $18..." An industry of excess. But that's kind of what you expected from the music business, right? It's where rock stars are made. It's where you get stretch limos with hot tubs in the back, where you get private jets and cocaine parties. Growing up in the '80's, with pop royalty and hair metal bands, you were kind of led to think, of course record labels blow money left and right - there's just so much of it to go around! Well, you know what they say: The bigger they are...

In those days, "piracy" was barely even a word in the music world. My friends and I traded MP3s in college over the local network, but they were scattered and low-quality. It felt like a novelty - like a digital version of duping a cassette tape - hardly a replacement for CDs. CDs sounded good and you could bring them with you in your DiscMan, and the only digital music you could get was as good as your friends' CD collections, anyway. It never occurred to any of us that digital files were the future. But as it turned out, lots of kids, in lots of colleges around the world, had the same idea of sharing MP3 files over their local networks, and eventually, someone paid attention to that idea and made Napster. Suddenly, it was like all those college networks were tied together, and you could find all this cool stuff online. It was easier and more efficient than record stores, it was powered by music fans, and, well, it was free. Suddenly you didn't have to pay 15 to 18 bucks for an album and hope it was good, you could download some tracks off the internet and check it out first. But you still always bought the CD if you liked it - I mean, who wants all their music to be on the computer? I sure didn't. But increasingly, more and more people did. For college kids, Napster was a Godsend, because you can all but guarantee two things about most college kids: They love music, and they're dirt poor. So it grew, and it grew, and it started to grow into the mainstream, and that's when the labels woke up and realized something important was happening. At that point they could have seen it as either a threat or an opportunity, and they, without hesitation, determined it to be a threat. It was a threat because essentially someone had come up with a better, free distribution method for the labels' product. To be fair, you can imagine how confusing this must have been for them - is there even a historical precedent for an industry's products suddenly being able to replicate and distribute on their own, without cost?

For quite a while - long after most tech-savvy music lovers - I resisted the idea of stealing music. Of course I would download MP3s - I downloaded a lot of stuff - but I would always make sure to buy the physical CD if it was something I liked. I knew a lot of musicians, a lot of them bewildered at what was happening to the industry they used to understand. People were downloading their music en masse, gorging on this new frontier like pigs at a troff - and worst of all, they felt entitled to do so. It was like it was okay simply because the technology existed that made it possible. But it wasn't okay - I mean, let's face it, no matter how you rationalized it, it was stealing, and because the technology existed to hotwire a car didn't make that okay, either. The artists lost control of distribution: They couldn't present albums the way they wanted to, in a package with nice artwork. They couldn't reveal it the way they wanted to, because music pirates got the albums online well before the actual release date. Control had been taken away from everyone who used to have it. It was a scary time in unfamiliar territory, where suddenly music fans became enemies to the artists and companies they had supported for years. It led to laughable hyperbole from bands like Metallica, instantly the poster-children of cry-baby rich rock stars, and the beginning of the image problem the industry has faced in its handling of the piracy issue. But still, at the time, I understood where they were coming from. Most musicians weren't rich like Metallica, and needed all the album sales they could get for both income and label support. Plus, it was their art, and they had created it - why shouldn't they be able to control how it's distributed, just because some snotty, acne-faced internet kids had found a way to cheat the system? And these entitled little internet brats, don't they realize that albums cost money to create, and to produce, and to promote? How is there going to be any new music if no one's paying for it?

On top of that, I couldn't get into the idea of an invisible music library that lives on my computer. Where's the artwork? Where's my collection? I want the booklet, the packaging... I want shelves and shelves of albums that I've spent years collecting, that I can pore over and impress my friends with... I want to flip through the pages, and hold the CD in my hand... Being a kid who got into music well past the days of vinyl, CDs were all I had, and they still felt important to me.

It's all changed.

In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent. I find myself fully immersed in digital music, almost never buying CDs, and fully against the methods of the major record labels and the RIAA. And I think it would do the music industry a lot of good to pay attention to why - because I'm just one of millions, and there will be millions more in the years to come. And it could have happened very, very differently.

As the years have passed, and technology has made digital files the most convenient, efficient, and attractive method of listening to music for many people, the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically. We live in the iPod generation - where a "collection" of clunky CDs feels archaic - where the uniqueness of your music collection is limited only by how eclectic your taste is. Where it's embraced and expected that if you like an album, you send it to your friend to listen to. Whether this guy likes it or not, iPods have become synonymous with music - and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

Already is the key word, because it didn't have to be this way, and that's become the main source of my utter lack of sympathy for the dying record industry: They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers - and they didn't. Instead, they panicked - they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades. They used their unfair record contracts - the ones that allowed them to own all the music - and went after children, grandparents, single moms, even deceased great grandmothers - alongside many other common people who did nothing more than download some songs and leave them in a shared folder - something that has become the cultural norm to the iPod generation. Joining together in what has been referred to as an illegal cartel and using the RIAA as their attack dogs, the record labels have spent billions of dollars attempting to scare people away from downloading music. And it's simply not working. The pirating community continues to out-smart and out-innovate the dated methods of the record companies, and CD sales continue to plummet while exchange of digital music on the internet continues to skyrocket. Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative. They didn't jump in when the new technologies were emerging and think, "how can we capitalize on this to ensure that we're able to stay afloat while providing the customer what they've come to expect?" They didn't band together and create a flat monthly fee for downloading all the music you want. They didn't respond by drastically lowering the prices of CDs (which have been ludicrously overpriced since day one, and actually increased in price during the '90's), or by offering low-cost DRM-free legal MP3 purchases. Their entry into the digital marketplace was too little too late - a precedent of free, high-quality, DRM-free music had already been set.

There seem to be a lot of reasons why the record companies blew it. One is that they're really not very smart. They know how to do one thing, which is sell records in a traditional retail environment. From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense, and every decision is hampered by miles and miles of legal tape, copyright restrictions, and corporate interests. Trying to innovate with a major label is like trying to teach your Grandmother how to play Halo 3: frustrating and ultimately futile. The easiest example of this is how much of a fight it's been to get record companies to sell MP3s DRM-free. You're trying to explain a new technology to an old guy who made his fortune in the hair metal days. You're trying to tell him that when someone buys a CD, it has no DRM - people can encode it into their computer as DRM-free MP3s within seconds, and send it to all their friends. So why insult the consumer by making them pay the same price for copy-protected MP3s? It doesn't make any sense! It just frustrates people and drives them to piracy! They don't get it: "It's an MP3, you have to protect it or they'll copy it." But they can do the same thing with the CDs you already sell!! Legal tape and lots of corporate bullshit. If these people weren't the ones who owned the music, it'd all be over already, and we'd be enjoying the real future of music. Because like with any new industry, it's not the people from the previous generation who are going to step in and be the innovators. It's a new batch.

Newspapers are a good example: It used to be that people read newspapers to get the news. That was the distribution method, and newspaper companies controlled it. You paid for a newspaper, and you got your news, that's how it worked. Until the internet came along, and a new generation of innovative people created websites, and suddenly anyone could distribute information, and they could distribute it faster, better, more efficiently, and for free. Obviously this hurt the newspaper industry, but there was nothing they could do about it, because they didn't own the information itself - only the distribution method. Their only choice was to innovate and find ways to compete in a new marketplace. And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet - and The New York Times still exists. Free market capitalism at its finest. It's not a perfect example, but it is a part of how the internet is changing every form of traditional media. It happened with newspapers, it's happening now with music, and TV and cell phones are next on the chopping block. In all cases technology demands that change will happen, it's just a matter of who will find ways to take advantage of it, and who won't.

Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can't just start your own website where you give out music that they own - and that's what this is all about: distribution. Lots of pro-piracy types argue that music can be free because people will always love music, and they'll pay for concert tickets, and merchandise, and the marketplace will shift and artists will survive. Well, yes, that might be an option for some artists, but that does nothing to help the record labels, because they don't make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens. The few major labels left are parts of giant media conglomerations - owned by huge parent companies for whom artists and albums are just numbers on a piece of paper. It's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade. They see that Gwen Stefani's latest musical turd sold millions, because parents of twelve year old girls still buy music for their kids, and the parent company demands more easy-money pop garbage that will be forgotten about next month. The only thing that matters to these corporations is profit - period. Music isn't thought of as an art form, as it was in the earlier days of the industry where labels were started by music-lovers - it's a product, pure and simple. And many of these corporations also own the manufacturing plants that create the CDs, so they make money on all sides - and lose money even from legal MP3s.

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery. This is yet another case of private, corporate interests using political influence to turn laws in the opposite direction of the changing values of the people. Or, as this very smart assessment from a record executive described it: "a clear case of a multinational conglomerate using its political muscle to the disadvantage of everyone but itself." But shady political maneuvers and scare tactics are all the RIAA and other anti-piracy groups have left, because people who download music illegally now number in the hundreds of millions, and they can't sue everyone. At this point they're just trying to hold up what's left of the dam before it bursts open. Their latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.

If you're not familiar with Oink, here's a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site - to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away. Oink's extremely strict quality standards ensured that everything on the site was at pristine quality - 192kbps MP3 was their bare minimum, and they championed much higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC lossless downloads. They encouraged logs to verify that the music had been ripped from the CD without any errors. Transcodes - files encoded from other encoded files, resulting in lower quality - were strictly forbidden. You were always guaranteed higher quality music than iTunes or any other legal MP3 store. Oink's strict download/share ratio ensured that every album in their vast database was always well-seeded, resulting in downloads faster than anywhere else on the internet. A 100mb album would download in mere seconds on even an average broadband connection. Oink was known for getting pre-release albums before anyone else on the internet, often months before they hit retail - but they also had an extensive catalogue of music dating back decades, fueled by music lovers who took pride in uploading rare gems from their collection that other users were seeking out. If there was an album you couldn't find on Oink, you only had to post a request for it, and wait for someone who had it to fill your request. Even if the request was extremely rare, Oink's vast network of hundreds of thousands of music-lovers eager to contribute to the site usually ensured you wouldn't have to wait long.

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world's largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he's a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink - but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

Here's an interesting aside: The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they're released in stores - painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course - the labels! At this point, most bands know that once their finished album is sent off to the label, the risk of it turning up online begins, because the labels are full of low-level workers who happen to be music fans who can't wait to share the band's new album with their friends. If the album manages to not leak directly from the label, it is guaranteed to leak once it heads off to manufacturing. Someone at the manufacturing plant is always happy to sneak off with a copy, and before long, it turns up online. Why? Because people love music, and they can't wait to hear their favorite band's new album! It's not about profit, and it's not about maliciousness. So record industry, maybe if you could protect your own assets a little better, shit wouldn't leak - don't blame the fans who flock to the leaked material online, blame the people who leak it out of your manufacturing plants in the first place! But assuming that's a hole too difficult to plug, it begs the question, "why don't labels adapt to the changing nature of distribution by selling new albums online as soon as they're finished, before they have a chance to leak, and release the physical CDs a couple months later?" Well, for one, labels are still obsessed with Billboard chart numbers - they're obsessed with determining the market value of their product by how well it fares in its opening week. Selling it online before the big retail debut, before they've had months to properly market the product to ensure success, would mess up those numbers (nevermind that those numbers mean absolutely nothing anymore). Additionally, selling an album online before it hits stores makes retail outlets (who are also suffering in all this) angry, and retail outlets have far more power than they should. For example, if a record company releases an album online but Wal-Mart won't have the CD in their stores for another two months (because it needs to be manufactured), Wal-Mart gets mad. Who cares if Wal-Mart gets mad, you ask? Well, record companies do, because Wal-Mart is, both mysteriously and tragically, the largest music retailer in the world. That means they have power, and they can say "if you sell Britney Spears' album online before we can sell it in our stores, we lose money. So if you do that, we're not going to stock her album at all, and then you'll lose a LOT of money." That kind of greedy business bullshit happens all the time in the record industry, and the consistent result is a worse experience for consumers and music lovers.

Which is why Oink was so great - take away all the rules and legal ties, all the ownership and profit margins, and naturally, the result is something purely for, by, and in service of the music fan. And it actually helps musicians - file-sharing is "the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry." One of Oink's best features was how it allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon's recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink, and that's what many of its users did. Through sites like Oink, the amount and variety of music I listen to has skyrocketed, opening me up to hundreds of artists I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them! And now that I have heard of them, I go to their concerts, and I talk them up to my friends, and give my friends the music to listen to for themselves, so they can go to the concerts, and tell their friends, and so on. Oink was a network of music lovers sharing and discovering music. And yes, it was all technically illegal, and destined to get shut down, I suppose. But it's not so much that they shut Oink down that boils my blood, it's the fucking bullshit propaganda they put out there. If the industry tried to have some kind of compassion - if they said, "we understand that these are just music fans trying to listen to as much music as they can, but we have to protect our assets, and we're working on an industry-wide solution to accommodate the changing needs of music fans"... Well, it's too late for that, but it would be encouraging. Instead, they make it sound like they busted a Columbian drug cartel or something. They describe it as a highly-organized piracy ring. Like Oink users were distributing kiddie porn or some shit. The press release says: "This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure." Wh - what?? That's EXACTLY what it was! No one made any money on that site - there were no ads, no registration fees. The only currency was ratio - the amount you shared with other users - a brilliant way of turning "free" into a sort of booming mini-economy. The anti-piracy groups have tried to spin the notion that you had to pay a fee to join Oink, which is NOT true - donations were voluntary, and went to support the hosting and maintenance of the site. If the donations spilled into profit for the guy who ran the site, well he damn well deserved it - he created something truly remarkable.

So the next question is, what now?

For the major labels, it's over. It's fucking over. You're going to burn to the fucking ground, and we're all going to dance around the fire. And it's your own fault. Surely, somewhere deep inside, you had to know this day was coming, right? Your very industry is founded on an unfair business model of owning art you didn't create in exchange for the services you provide. It's rigged so that you win every time - even if the artist does well, you do ten times better. It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that's back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.

None of this is to say that there's no way for artists to make money anymore, or even that it's the end of record labels. It's just the end of record labels as we know them. A lot of people point to the Radiohead model as the future, but Radiohead is only dipping its toe into the future to test the waters. What at first seemed like a rainbow-colored revolution has now been openly revealed as a marketing gimmick: Radiohead was "experimenting," releasing a low-quality MP3 version of an album only to punish the fans who paid for it by later releasing a full-quality CD version with extra tracks. According to Radiohead's manager: "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD then we wouldn't do what we are doing." Ouch. Radiohead was moving in the right direction, but if they really want to start a revolution, they need to place the "pay-what-you-want" digital album on the same content and quality level as the "pay-what-we-want" physical album.

Ultimately, I don't know what the future model is going to be - I think all the current pieces of the puzzle will still be there, but they need to be re-ordered, and the rules need to be changed. Maybe record labels of the future exist to help front recording costs and promote artists, but they don't own the music. Maybe music is free, and musicians make their money from touring and merchandise, and if they need a label, the label takes a percentage of their tour and merch profits. Maybe all-digital record companies give bands all the tools they need to sell their music directly to their fans, taking a small percentage for their services. In any case, the artists own their own music.

I used to reject the wishy-washy "music should be free!" mantra of online music thieves. I knew too much about the intricacies and economics of it, of the rock-and-a-hard-place situation many artists were in with their labels. I thought there were plenty of new ways to sell music that would be fair to all parties involved. But I no longer believe that, because the squabbling, backwards, greedy, ownership-obsessed major labels will never let it happen, and that's more clear to me now than ever. So maybe music has to be free. Maybe taking the money out of music is the only way to get money back into it. Maybe it's time to abandon the notion of the rock star - of music as a route to fame and fortune. The best music was always made by people who weren't in it for the money, anyway. Maybe smart, talented musicians will find ways to make a good living with or without CD sales. Maybe the record industry execs who made their fortunes off of unfair contracts and distribution monopolies should just walk away, confident that they milked a limited opportunity for all it was worth, and that it's time to find fortune somewhere else. Maybe in the hands of consumers, the music marketplace will expand in new and lucrative ways no one can even dream of yet. We won't know until music is free, and eventually it's going to be. Technological innovation destroys old industries, but it creates new ones. You can't fight it forever.

Until the walls finally come down, we're in what will inevitably be looked back on as a very awkward, chaotic period in music history - fans are being arrested for sharing the music they love, and many artists are left helpless, unable to experiment with new business models because they're locked into record contracts with backwards-thinking labels.

So what can you and I do to help usher in the brave new world? The beauty of Oink was how fans willingly and hyper-efficiently took on distribution roles that traditionally have cost labels millions of dollars. Music lovers have shown that they're much more willing to put time and effort into music than they are money. It's time to show artists that there's no limit to what an energized online fanbase can accomplish, and all they'll ever ask for in return is more music. And it's time to show the labels that they missed a huge opportunity by not embracing these opportunities when they had the chance.

1. Stop buying music from major labels. Period. The only way to force change is to hit the labels where it hurts - their profits. The major labels are like Terry Schiavo right now - they're on life support, drooling in a coma, while white-haired guys in suits try and change the laws to keep them alive. But any rational person can see that it's too late, and it's time to pull out the feeding tube. In this case, the feeding tube is your money. Find out which labels are members/supporters of the RIAA and similar copyright enforcement groups, and don't support them in any way. The RIAA Radar is a great tool to help you with this. Don't buy CDs, don't buy iTunes downloads, don't buy from Amazon, etc. Steal the music you want that's on the major labels. It's easy, and despite the RIAA's scare tactics, it can be done safely - especially if more and more people are doing it. Send letters to those labels, and to the RIAA, explaining very calmly and professionally that you will no longer be supporting their business, because of their bullish scare tactics towards music fans, and their inability to present a forward-thinking digital distribution solution. Tell them you believe their business model is outdated and the days of companies owning artists' music are over. Make it very clear that you will continue to support the artists directly in other ways, and make it VERY clear that your decision has come about as a direct result of the record company's actions and inactions regarding digital music.

2. Support artists directly. If a band you like is stuck on a major label, there are tons of ways you can support them without actually buying their CD. Tell everyone you know about them - start a fansite if you're really passionate. Go to their shows when they're in town, and buy t-shirts and other merchandise. Here's a little secret: Anything a band sells that does not have music on it is outside the reach of the record label, and monetarily supports the artist more than buying a CD ever would. T-shirts, posters, hats, keychains, stickers, etc. Send the band a letter telling them that you're no longer going to be purchasing their music, but you will be listening to it, and you will be spreading the word and supporting them in other ways. Tell them you've made this decision because you're trying to force change within the industry, and you no longer support record labels with RIAA affiliations who own the music of their artists.

If you like bands who are releasing music on open, non-RIAA indie labels, buy their albums! You'll support the band you like, and you'll support hard-working, passionate people at small, forward-thinking music labels. If you like bands who are completely independent and are releasing music on their own, support them as much as possible! Pay for their music, buy their merchandise, tell all your friends about them and help promote them online - prove that a network of passionate fans is the best promotion a band can ask for.

3. Get the message out. Get this message out to as many people as you can - spread the word on your blog or your MySpace, and more importantly, tell your friends at work, or your family members, people who might not be as tuned into the internet as you are. Teach them how to use torrents, show them where to go to get music for free. Show them how to support artists while starving the labels, and who they should and shouldn't be supporting.

4. Get political. The fast-track to ending all this nonsense is changing intellectual property laws. The RIAA lobbies politicians to manipulate copyright laws for their own interests, so voters need to lobby politicians for the peoples' interests. Contact your local representatives and senators. Tell them politely and articulately that you believe copyright laws no longer reflect the interests of the people, and you will not vote for them if they support the interests of the RIAA. Encourage them to draft legislation that helps change the outdated laws and disproportionate penalties the RIAA champions. Contact information for state representatives can be found here, and contact information for senators can be found here. You can email them, but calling on the phone or writing them actual letters is always more effective.

Tonight, with Oink gone, I find myself wondering where I'll go now to discover new music. All the other options - particularly the legal ones - seem depressing by comparison. I wonder how long it will be before everyone can legally experience the type of music nirvana Oink users became accustomed to? I'm not too worried - something even better will rise out of Oink's ashes, and the RIAA will respond with more lawsuits, and the cycle will repeat itself over and over until the industry has finally bled itself to death. And then everything will be able to change, and it will be in the hands of musicians and fans and a new generation of entrepreneurs to decide how the new record business is going to work. Whether you agree with it or not, it's fact. It's inevitable - because the determination of fans to share music is much, much stronger than the determination of corporations to stop it.

Linux, Windows and OS X according to their users

Federico Pistono — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:42:22 +0000

True.

Amazing HTML demo - the future of video and Web is Open Source

Federico Pistono — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:32:27 +0000

I report verbatim an article from the standblog which represents perfectly what I think is the future of video and how should the web be: Open Source, open minded, multiplatform, easy, fast and cool.

For years, digital video has been soaring, just like still digital images 15 years earlier. It's now easy to capture video, editing it is now possible thanks to user-friendly applications and with broadband becoming more common, the pipes are now big enough to download video. The only caveat is that Web browsers have not evolved over time to include video, because the dominant browser vendor had little reason to invest in it. Proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media have been until now the only way for Web developers to include video in their Web application. Unfortunately, resorting to proprietary plug-ins and patented codecs has drawbacks. I won't get into the patent and proprietary code issues and focus on the fact that resorting to plug-ins for video brings some limitations to what one can do. Plug-ins are like boxy islands of information on a page. They can do wonders by themselves, but they have a hard time being mixed with the rest of the Web content. It's hard for example to interact with a Flash video, unless you write the complete page in Flash. But all of this is now over, since Firefox 3.5 and other modern browsers support native video using the new <video> element. Now, a native video is just an element in a page that you can manipulate with the DOM, style with CSS etc.

This is why my friend Paul Rouget has written an amazing demo, which uses no Plug-in technology, juste native Web technologies such as JavaScript, DOM, and HTML 5 elements (video and canvas). If you run Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 or Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 or later, you can visit Paul's Dynamic Content Injection demo. If you want to experience it yourself, just Get your copy of Firefox 3.1/3.5 Beta, install it and visit Paul's demo. For those of my readers who are stuck with another browser for some reason (and have to use the old proprietary plug-ins), I'm made a quick screencast below:

Screencast of Paul Rouget's Dynamic content injection via canvas and video elements

(If you can't view this video for some reason, here it is in Ogg Theora format (11MB) and MPEG-4 format (31MB))

What's cool with this demo?

It's built with native Open Web technologies: JavaScript + DOM, CSS and HTML 5 (canvas and video) that hundreds of thousand people are already familiar with.
It's Open Source by default. You can view the source and learn from it. This is one of the very reasons why the Web is so wonderful: it's the mother of all generative technologies.
It's just the beginning (at least we hope it is) of very cool innovations around videos and special effects. When will we see a Web-based video-editing application? Who knows what we'll collectively be able to build?

Want more explanations of what happens under the hood? Just View Source (Ctrl-U)^[1], read the code and head over to Paul's explanations. Then imagine what you can do with this... and build it!

Notes

[1] Try that with a Flash applet