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Experimental Fees Settle Royalty War For Internet Radio

samzenpus — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:57:00 PDT

S-100 writes "SoundExchange has reached an agreement for royalty rates with a consortium of Internet radio broadcasters. The parties are ecstatic that the issue is finally resolved, and that the new rates are below the previous 'death to Internet radio' levels that had previously been imposed by the CARB. According to NewsFactor, Pandora founder Tim Westergren proclaims that 'the royalty crisis is over!', and other large broadcasters are equally pleased. One unheard-from group is less likely to be pleased: small Internet radio broadcasters. Buried in the details are a new minimum royalty payment: $25,000 per year. So say goodbye to all of the small Internet radio stations that you have been listening to, as they will no longer afford to operate legally."

Nokia adopts Qt toolkit for next-generation Maemo platform

segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:15:00 PDT

During a keynote presentation at the Desktop Summit, Maemo community manager Quim Gil announced that the application framework in future versions of Nokia's Linux platform will use the Qt toolkit. This change will have a significant impact on the Maemo platform and its third-party developer community.

Maemo is a Linux platform based on Debian that Nokia originally created for its Internet Tablet devices. Its user interface and application toolkit is called Hildon, a variant of GTK+ that is optimized for touchscreen mobile environments. Maemo has always been closely aligned with the GNOME mobile and embedded ecosystem, which has made it very easy for popular GTK+ applications to be ported to the platform. Maemo 5, a major new version that is currently under active development, will use a combination of GTK+ and the increasingly popular Clutter scenegraph library. The subsequent version, codenamed Harmattan, will adopt Qt as the dominant toolkit.

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Cuando a Microsoft le da por regalar su Windows…

sergio — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:44:00 PDT

La directiva explicó en su intervención en el Foro Sociedad en Red, organizado por Europa Press en colaboración con Red.es, que no contemplan “dar gratis el software”, pero sí “por un precio inferior a lo que me gasto en comer una ensalada por mi zona de trabajo”. Y concretó una cifra: “Damos todo el sistema por menos de 40 euros, y en el paquete incluimos Windows, Office e incluso la formación del profesorado”.

Microsoft «regalando» su software al precio de la ensalada más cara que se haya visto. Mientras, lejos de este increíble mundo de locura, la Junta de Andalucía usa la cabeza e instalará Guadalinex en los 400.000 portátiles que distribuirá, ahorrandose 16 millones de euros que se podrán invertir en cosas más útiles que simplemente engordar las cuentas de la empresa de Seattle.

Latitude

(author unknown) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:00:00 PDT

The policing of protests has to change | Henry Porter

Henry Porter — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:31:03 PDT

Today's report shows that, following G20, police don't just need to change their tactics but their whole attitude to political protests

The highly critical report into the policing of the G20 demonstrations makes it clear that it is not just the tactics used by the police that must change but the whole attitude to political expression on the streets.

"As a police service," said Chris Allison, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, we have clear duties under the law: to facilitate protest." You will find many senior police officers who say the same, but it is amazing that it took the death of Ian Tomlinson and more than 250 complaints about the G20 operation, including 50 of using excessive force, for this to be articulated in public so clearly.

Allison says he wants to move forward – code that asks people to forget what happened. That won't be possible until we see demonstrations policed with a respect for those expressing their legitimate views. Kettling is clearly an inflammatory tactic, which was responsible for a large amount of the trouble and violence. Despite hard lobbying from senior officers, that must end.

The atmosphere over the G20 summit wasn't helped by a media operation, which predicted violence ahead of the demonstrations and encouraged police officers to think that confrontation was inevitable. This was no doubt designed to deter people from attending, but what it may have done was allow certain police officers to believe that they had the full support of the government whatever they did. This predictive briefing must also end.

At the G20 demonstrations, it certainly looks like some of the rights laid down in the Human Rights Act were breached – those concerning freedom to assemble and protest, and of course privacy. One of the more sinister activities of the modern police is the collection of data and images from Forward Intelligence Teams, which seem to act in an intrusive and overbearing manner. As the Panorama programme, Whatever Happened to People Power, showed last night, Forward Intelligence Teams are filming people who attend perfectly legal meetings and political protests. Often they are collecting their car numbers so that individuals can be tagged on the ANPR system for future monitoring. This must also end.

Today's report, Adapting to Protest (pdf), by Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabularies, is welcome. A key sentence is, "What the review [of policing protest] identifies is that the world is changing and the police need to think about changing their approach to protest." That must be evident after the large number of citizen journalists filmed the police and, in the case of Ian Tomlinson, acquired vital evidence concerning his death.

The police have to understand that every action they take on these occasions is likely to be recorded. They cannot simply close down the cell phone network or interrupt the web as the Iranian and Chinese authorities have done over the last few weeks. In Britain, there is a new generation of protesters who are sophisticated, know their rights and are adept at using modern technology and the internet. To police a demonstration on climate change in the same way as you would the industrial troubles of the 80s is clearly inadequate, particularly as climate change demonstrators have the express support of Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, who has said that they were essential to maintaining pressure on the government.

It is essential the police bring themselves to an understanding of the legitimate aims of demonstrators, who in most cases could not be more honourably motivated.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Microsoft issues patent promise, dispels Mono legal concerns

segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:00:48 PDT

Microsoft community manager Peter Galli announced Wednesday that Microsoft will apply its Community Promise to ECMA 334 and 335, the standards that document the C# programming language and .NET's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). This move affirms Microsoft's willingness to enable the development of third-party .NET implementations such as Mono.

The Community Promise is a legally binding commitment through which Microsoft pledges to not assert its patents against others who implement certain Microsoft standards and technologies. This means that developers can create their own interoperable versions without exposing themselves to the risk of patent infringement lawsuits from Microsoft. Unlike the covenant that was part of Microsoft's controversial agreement with Novell, the Community Promise does not discriminate against any users or restrict downstream redistribution. It is generally compatible with open source licenses and philosophies.

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The Insecurity of Secrecy

schneier — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:18:49 PDT

Good essay -- "The Staggering Cost of Playing it 'Safe'" -- about the political motivations for terrorist security policy.

Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk to the areas where they live. However, even this effort has been blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity, dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.
Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs" national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.

Nerds and Jocks

Nat Friedman — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:47:17 PDT

Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count).

Both these terms are pejorative, but “nerd” was my stigma. At dinner one evening in 3rd grade, I explained to my parents that my friends and I were the nerds, and that we were proud of it. I still remember my father’s horrified reaction. “You’re not a nerd!” he said.

Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense - but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice.

So when I moved to Germany, and found myself having to explain this whole concept to bewildered friends and colleagues, I started to think about the nerd-jock duality a little deeper. What I realized is that, in Germany, engineering is not stigmatized in the same way that it is in the US. It is possible to self-identify as an engineer, even at a very early age, without being a nerd.

Germany is, in fact, a country of engineers. It has to be. Think about it: a cold, cloudy country ranked only 62nd in land mass, 14th in population, and yet in 2008 Germany was #1 in the world in exports by dollars! Yes, ahead of the US and ahead of China. How is that possible? Nerds! Oops, I mean engineers; engineers who design and build high-quality cars, engines, tools, machinery, scientific equipment. This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers.

But what kind of country do you get when you do stigmatize nerds? I’m afraid you get a country of importers. A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school. A country of people who don’t make things.

My 20 year old sister informs me that the “nerd” thing has softened a bit in recent years, but maybe not always for the right reasons. Lots more people spend time with technological devices now, and to be part of the priesthood that creates them, tweaks them, hacks them is more impactful than it used to be.

But one of the reasons “nerd” isn’t such a dirty word now is because some nerds get rich. And that’s the wrong reason to appreciate nerds. Because only very few nerds will get rich, but we need lots of engineers to build our society.

The archetypes that you have as a country matter. They affect the kind of society you create. We have a lot of good archetypes in the US. We have the pioneer, the frontiersman, the individualist, the entrepreneur. Let’s keep those. But we can do without the whole nerd/jock thing. It isn’t helping.

And I think we’d do well to celebrate the engineer archetype again. I hear it was a big thing in the 50s. Can we bring it back?

Know Who’s Calling: Tactile Design

Aza Raskin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:04:17 PDT

I keep my phone in my pocket. This has the (un)fortunate side effect of putting the entire internet in my pants. When I get a call, I have to do a little dance to slip the phone out of my pocket and in to my hand.

I’m one of those people who thinks its rude to answer the phone in the middle of a conversation. It’s worse when it’s during dinner. It’s even border-line rude to just check the phone to see whose calling before slipping it away. I want to know whose calling before I go pocket diving.

Having my phone read out the caller’s name isn’t a tenable solution: I’d don’t want to broadcast that information to everyone near me. Imagine the embarrassment of being on a date and having your ex’s name announced by your phone to the room at large. Or worse, “Mom” being blared in the middle of your slam poetry reading. We’re going to need a more local solution.

I generally keep my phone on vibrate; it’s less intrusive that way. Given a name, it’s not difficult to deduce its basic constituent phonemes (every text-to-speech program does it). Here’s the thought, have the vibrator buzz out the phonemes of the caller’s name. The name Alexis, would be “br br brrr” and Jenny would be “Brr brr”, and Dan would be “bRrr. Imagine it as the sound of trying to say someone’s name without opening your mouth, complete with pitch and loudness modulation (which can be controlled with vibration speed and strength).

Playing around with a toy implementation, the mapping seems to be fairly natural. Learning the feel for a name is close to instant.

I know what your thinking, though: With my hundreds of contacts, how can I possibly differentiate them all from the buzz patterns?

The answer is that you don’t need to.

Most of us get calls regularly from less than 10 people. On Facebook, where the cost of communication is significantly lower than placing a call, an average man has two-way communication regularly with only 4 people. For women, that number is 6. (Data from Primates on Facebook). Learning to differentiate even 10 buzz patterns that feel like the way a name sounds is easy. That covers 90% of your use cases. And keeping you from needing to take your phone out of your pocket 9 out of 10 times is a big win.

Just a thought. It doesn’t bother you when it doesn’t work, doesn’t require you to go through a setup process to choose a ring/vibrate for each person, and is quick to learn. Plus, it gives the phone a bit of emotional impact (think Pixar).

Any other solutions?

Update: Dietrich Ayala has created a working version of this idea for Andriod phones.

JOURNAL: Financial Capitalism's Failure?

John Robb — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:39:05 PDT

Here's an article from the premier financial newspaper in the world, the Financial Times, on a situation that I believe is catalyzing the current crisis (hoisted from Paul Kedrosky's blog).

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite. The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all. According to Société Générale economists, the inflation-adjusted income of the highest-paid fifth of US earners has risen by 60 per cent since 1970, while it has fallen by more than 10 per cent for the rest. As was recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, is wealthier than the bottom third of the US population put together – about 100m people. These are staggering statistics, confirmed by measures such as the US and UK’s ever-rising Gini coefficients, which estimate income disparity. Another way of putting this is that the share of profits in gross domestic product is at a 100-year high, or was until very recently.

More GG posts that relate to this topic:

Open Decision Making.

America's Economy and Open Decision Making.

Parasitic Predation.

Economic Cancer.

NOTE: The reason I posted about this and think it is interesting is simple. Like Kennan (the intellectual architect of Cold War's "containment" policy), it's important to recognize what really generates a long term victory in a protracted conflict. Then, like now, real victory requires a long term improvement in the quality of life -- from incomes to wealth to societal trust to fairness -- of the maximal number of people (to slow/reverse communism in his case and to slow/reverse disorder in ours) while at the same time, blunting the kinetic advance of the collective opposition at the least possible expense/disruption to the first goal. We appear to be failing at both of the goals required for long term victory. Incomes and societal trust are evaporating while we spend tens of millions to kill each insurgent (of which there is an endless supply, particularly if you seek them out).

Themes are GPL, too

Matt — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:50:35 PDT

If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preeminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

Matt,

You asked the Software Freedom Law Center to clarify the status of themes as derivative works of WordPress, a content management software package written in PHP and licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

We examined release candidate 1 of WordPress 2.8, which you provided to us at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8-RC1.tar.gz. The “classic” and “default” themes included in that release candidate comprise various PHP and CSS files along with an optional directory of images. The PHP files contain a mix of HTML markup and PHP calls to
WordPress functions. There is some programmatic logic in the PHP code, including loops and conditionals.

When WordPress is started, it executes various routines that prepare information for use by themes. In normal use, control is then transferred via PHP’s include() function to HTML and PHP templates found in theme package files. The PHP code in those template files relies on the earlier-prepared information to fill the templates for serving to the client.

On the basis of that version of WordPress, and considering those themes as if they had been added to WordPress by a third party, it is our opinion that the themes presented, and any that are substantially similar, contain elements that are derivative works of the WordPress software as well as elements that are potentially separate works. Specifically, the CSS files and material contained in the images directory of the “default” theme are works separate from the WordPress code. On the other hand, the PHP and HTML code that is intermingled with and operated on by PHP the code derives from the WordPress code.

In the WordPress themes, CSS files and images exist purely as data to be served by a web server. WordPress itself ignores these files[1]. The CSS and image files are simply read by the server as data and delivered verbatim to the user, avoiding the WordPress instance altogether. The CSS and images could easily be used with a range of HTML documents and read and displayed by a variety of software having no relation to WordPress. As such, these files are separate works from the WordPress code itself.

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

HTML elements are intermingled with PHP in the two themes presented. These snippets of HTML interspersed with PHP throughout the theme PHP files together form a work whose form is highly dependent on the PHP and thus derivative of it.

In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress’s copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.

Finally, we note that it might be possible to design a valid WordPress theme that avoids the factors that subject it to WordPress’s copyright, but such a theme would have to forgo almost all the WordPress functionality that makes the software useful.

Sincerely,
James Vasile
Software Freedom Law Center

[1] There is one exception. WordPress does reads CSS and image files to create previews of templates for the template selection portion of the administrative interface. Even in that case, though, nothing in those files calls any WordPress functions, is treated as a command by PHP, or alters any other WordPress data structure. These files are read as data and used to create an image and display a miniaturized version of a webpage to the user.

Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more

The Gmail Team — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:41:04 PDT

Posted by Damian Gajda, Software Engineer

A few months ago Gmail got some new buttons and keyboard shortcuts to make labeling easier, especially for those of you accustomed to that familiar folder feel. Now we're making some more changes to Gmail's labeling toolkit.

1) New location for labels
You'll notice your labels in a new location on the left of your inbox (or on the right, for those of you using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail). Instead of having their own section, your labels are now above your chat list, grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels.

2) Label hiding and showing
You now have control over which of your labels show. We've done our best to get you started by automatically showing the labels you use most and hiding the rest. Label hiding is my favorite new feature, since it saves me from having to look through labels I rarely use. If I ever need to reach any of my old labels, I just click the "more" link.

You can show, hide, or delete a label by clicking the down-arrow to the left of that label.

If you want to make a lot of changes at once, go to the Labels tab under Settings where you can edit labels in bulk.

For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top of the list (come on, you know who you are, I did it too...), you don't have to come up with clever tricks like that anymore ;)

3) Drag and drop
You can now drag messages into labels, just like you can with folders. This does the exact same thing as "Move to" — it labels and archives in one step.

You can drag labels onto messages too. It's the same thing as using the "Label" button. To label or move many messages at once, first select the messages and then drag and drop the label.

It's also possible to drag labels into the "more" menu to hide them and vice versa. If you only want to move a couple labels around, I've found it quicker than going to Settings.

All of these changes also mean the end of Right-side Labels, an experimental Gmail Labs feature. This is the first Labs feature we're retiring. (The idea behind Labs was always that things could break or disappear at any time or they might work so well that they become regular features. More on that soon...) Now that labels aren't in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen didn't seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left nav screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.

We hope these new changes make labeling even easier and help you stay organized. We'll be rolling out these labeling features for everyone throughout the day, so if you don't see them right away please check later today.

Els infants de les Galápagos

ignasimascaro — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:34:07 PDT

Cap al final, el debat es resumeix en el següent supòsit presentat a diversos experts en el llenguatge humà: imaginem que deixam un grup de criatures humanes a les Illes Galápagos, amb prou menjar i aliment per sobreviure: creu vostè que crearan un llenguatge? Quantes criatures farien falta per fer-ho?

Fa unes dècades era impensable discutir aquestes qüestions, el que sí es discutia és l’arbre de les llengües naturals existents: llengües, grups, famílies, macrofamíles, l’indoeuropeu, l’ euràsic, el nostràtic, etc: evolució i comparació, com feia Darwin, i els botànics. Però açò només ens porta a una reconstrucció creïble 10.000 anys enrera, molt poc; i prou per reconstruir el canvi, la dispersió, i fins it tot quantificar-la i treure’n projeccions, predir que l’anglès que al s. XIV tenia 177 verbs irregulars, i ara en té 98, d’aquí a 100 anys en tindrà 45. To see-saw-seen, bé, ja ho veurem, ho diu la ciència! l’evolució de les llengües no ha acabat, però ara en deim canvi lingüístic, variació, i la veim, tota generació la percep, veu que els avis no parlen igual que els néts.

Ara mateix el debat no és aquest, sinó a reprendre sobre noves bases una controvèrsia abandonada fa mes d’un segle: com apareix el llenguatge en els humans, si hi ha un big-bang genètic que fa emergir el llenguatge (és el que diuen que diu N. Chomsky) o més aviat una llarga i lenta gradualitat, fa 100.000 anys, o potser més enrera? Els gestos són anteriors a les vocalitzacions? Què va canviar exactament en la fisiologia del cervell essent que el sapiens sapiens és anatòmicament estable almenys els darrers 200.000 anys? Com passam del pensament al llenguatge, si acceptam que els animals també pensen? La música va modelar el llenguatge o és a l’inrevés? Quin nivell de complexitat cultural és impensable sense llenguatge? Si és possible una vida interior i i una vida social complexa sense paraules, de què va necessitar parlar el sapiens? Etc. Etc.

No tenim fòssils lingüístics, és a dir, llengües en estat de formació que ens permetin imaginar com és la gradació i el procés de complexitat que ens menen a qualsevol de les llengües existents: totes les llengües són complexes, amb aspectes fàcils i difícils. Durant un temps vaig seguir la història del piraha: un antropòleg d’Illinois, Daniel L. Everett, havia tobat una tribu amazònica (350 individus, caçadors-recol·lectors) que parlava una llengua pretesament “deficient”: només comptava fins a 2, no tenia temps verbals, 3 vocals i 7 consonants, sense noms per als colors, etc. És a dir, tota una excepció als grans universals lingüístics, si fos ver. En algun paper he vist que Everett ha estat tractat amb crueltat, recriminant-li que que vint anys amb la tribu no li van bastar per entendre que el piraha és tan complex com les altres llengües, que la seva descripció era incorrecta…, que no havia entès res! No he seguit el debat, però sembla establert que el piraha no és el que a un altre nivell se’n diu the missing link: no hi ha, definitivament, llengües primitives. Ni hem trobat tampoc el gen del Llenguatge, el famós FOXP2.

El debat és apassionant i està en plena efervescència sota diversos rètols: lingüística evolutiva, biolingüística. I en algun lloc, atents a la seva opinió, el sempre influient Noam Chomsky, a qui alguns acusen d’apuntar-s’hi dècades després de desinteressar-se’n amb l’argument que no hi ha res a dir de fiable. Per cert, diuen que Chomsky és dur i despietat en els debats científics, m’agrada que sigui així, la bonhomia que el caracteritza no té res a veure amb la recerca de la veritat; potser per açò també alguns es mostren durs amb el Mestre, si és cert que manifesta interès en quelcom que llargament havia menyspreat, els deixebles brillants i emancipats (Jackendoff, Pinker) no perdonen: la recerca sobre l’origen del llenguatge comença a resultar fèrtil, impensable només fa trenta anys. De fet (sol ser-ne un indicador)la qüestió sovint és present en el sensacionalisme científic: “aïllat el gen llenguatge”.

Un autor, Michael Arbib, en un llarg relat, ha imaginat que tot neix amb la pantomima, en el gest creador de significats. Gestos fets arbitraris i acompanyats de vocalitzacions. En aquest escenari el mim vocalitzat és una habilitat guanyadora, cridada a ser seleccionada. Relats n’hi ha molts, és una creativitat feta a partir de bones preguntes; que de moment no ho puguis demostrar no vol dir que no puguis imaginar com va ser, si no vaig errat els físics i astrònoms ho fan a tothora.

A l’altre costat, en noble tradició literària, servam la versió mítica, per exemple, Llibre del Gènesi 2, 19-20 , i el mateix la tradició vèdica, i la xinesa…La versió mítica és poesia, de la bona; per sort molts teòlegs ja ho veuen d’una altra manera: és poesia versus cròniques històriques, no en lloc de veritat; tot i que per segles va alimentar la recerca precientífica: Adam, Eva i la llengua hebrea, Babel i la dispersió. Però aquesta història ja la coneixem: un verset de la Bíblia valia més que un telescopi rudimentari que mira cap el cel en la nit fosca, el deler de saber, el goig i l’angoixa d’entendre.

Tornem-hi: i què serà dels infants de Les Galápagos? A la pregunta de Christine Kenneally (Sobre el orígens del llenguatge, 2009, en l’ed. esp) distints autors opinen:

Ens caldrien almenys 30 infants/

Tindrien un llenguatge a partir de la tercera generació/

No, no crearien cap llenguatge humà/

És improbable: crearien un protollenguatge, però el salt qualitatiu dependria de quanta informació hagin de comunciar/

(…)

I Steven Pinker, el darrer, potser el més conegut, hi diu la seva: Jo diria que els infants crearien un llenguatge simple però flúid, potser una barreja de signes i de parla, quelcom entre un criollo i la llengua nicaragüense de signes.

JOURNAL: Resilience Judo

John Robb — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:19:40 PDT

There are growing signs -- from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence -- that the parasite ridden American "consumer" is finally dead. If this is true, the economic model of the latter half of the last Century is likely dead too, and that will mean wrenching change. It's my belief that the dominant solution is to prepare for a local future to ride out this storm. Here are some of my random (more random than I would like) thoughts on what you should do to prepare:

Ruthlessly reduce debt. Nothing on credit. Pay off every loan. Strategically walk away from underwater assets (like homes that are worth less than the mortgage). This will allow you to stay one step ahead of the death throes of the old economy.
Turn your hollow home into a productive asset. Most homes are devoid of any productive capacity. Adding energy, food, etc production to them turns them into real, productive assets. Get your assets out of financial derivatives (stocks, bonds, etc.) as fast as you can and put them into productive assets (not commodities) you can touch.
Make everything you can yourself. Grow your own food. Produce your own energy. Make/repair your own clothes. Turn costs into savings. Reskill to do this. The new "fashionable trend" isn't what you can buy, it's what you can make. Anyone that buys "designer or branded" anything is a fool.
Work online. Convert your skills into something that can be sold electronically (most of my complex work is done this way). Develop the skills necessary to work as part of a virtual team. Telecommute whenever possible (and push to do this, even if it means less money), reduce the number of cars/dress clothes/etc you own in synch with this conversion (and move to a less expensive locale when possible!). Always have two jobs going at the same time.
Build a local business. Own assets that produce and sell that production locally. Even if it is small, it will help down the line via contact networks/experience (a new spin on modern "networking"). Develop the niche skills that sell locally. Group/tribe up when possible to tackle larger opportunities.
Barter. Cashless trades. Convert what you have to what you need. Skill set bartering is amazingly effective. Become part of a local barter network (the backchannel).
Bring your family home. Grow your home to accommodate more people. Bring back parents and grown kids (with their families). This will allow you to pool incomes and radically reduce workload/costs. It's also beneficial for security. NOTE: I've found that consideration/compromise is the best way to handle an expansive family home environment.
Suggestions welcome!!

This change doesn't require cute and crunchy notions about "lifestyle" environmentalism. It's all about mitigation of stresses in the short to medium term as living conditions deteriorate, while at the same time preparing to ride the resilient community wave to rapid and sustained long term success/wealth.

Let's see this new Shell | Kate Allen

Kate Allen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:14:58 PDT

If the oil giant truly wants reconciliation in the Niger Delta, its incoming CEO must take concrete action

A new chief executive takes the helm at Shell today. Peter Voser will preside over a company which generated about $458bn revenue in 2008 and has operations in more than 100 countries, and at a time when the oil industry has never been under more scrutiny. A Shell man since 1982 and said to be a "safe pair of hands", Voser will be remunerated to the tune of more than £3m. At Amnesty we hope a concerted effort to turn around Shell's appalling reputation in the Niger Delta will be at the top of the agenda of the first board meeting he leads.

Shell is by far the biggest oil firm operating in a region where in March 2008 it was estimated that at least 2,000 sites required treatment because of oil pollution – and some of these oil spills occurred years ago. Independent oil and environmental experts estimate that between 9m and 13m barrels of oil have been spilt in the Delta area during the last 50 years – that's the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every year.

A report by Amnesty today (pdf) finds that the cumulative effect of 50 years of oil exploration, extraction and spills is that many people in the Niger Delta have to drink, cook with, and wash in polluted water; they have to eat contaminated fish – if they are lucky enough to still be able to find fish – and farm on spoiled land. After oil spills the air reeks of pollutants. Many have been driven into poverty, and because they can't make Shell accountable for its actions there is enormous distrust between the group and local people.

Those who have protested against the environmental damage that has ruined their lives have been victims of repression. Shell recently settled out of court with relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other people who were executed in 1995, as well as victims of violence in Ogoniland, thereby avoiding a courtroom test of whether the company was complicit in these killings. Today Shell continues its operations in a place wracked by armed groups and criminal gangs, sabotage of oil facilities, theft of oil, and long-running disputes over how spills are to be cleaned up. Usually Shell says sabotage has caused a spill and therefore it is not liable; local people say equipment failure is to blame; and the Nigerian government refuses to effectively arbitrate.

The failure of the Nigerian government is a critical part of this story. Oil is estimated to have earned Nigeria more than $600bn since the 1960s, and the oil and gas sector represents about 80% of government revenues. Its reluctance to take on oil companies is not difficult to understand. All many local people will ever see of the state are armed soldiers visiting the region to protect oil company assets. Shell and the other oil operators are able to take advantage of this situation to carry on regardless knowing they will not be challenged.

The complexity of the situation has too often been used as an excuse for inaction by both the government and the oil firms. It leads to vague commitments like those of Shell's Malcolm Brinded on this site recently about it being "time to move on" and "move along the reconciliation process".

What is urgently needed is some concrete and specific action from Shell to change the way it works in the Niger Delta. Peter Voser could commit to cleaning up oil spills promptly, and adequately compensating those affected – and, critically, declare Shell's support for effective independent regulation and promise not to lobby against this.

If fairness and the rule of law can be brought to truly control the oil industry in Niger Delta then maybe there really could be a new start for both local people and Shell.

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Facebook, espiral en caída

David de Ugarte — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:37:15 PDT

El equipo directivo de Facebook está intentando reanimar la confianza en su propio futuro, como apunta un reciente y muy comentado artículo en Wired, .

Los hechos de partida no son muy halagüeños: mientras Google -a quién consideran su competidor de fondo- obtenía 15.800 millones de ingresos netos, de los cuales 4.200 fueron de beneficios, Facebook seguía en pérdidas ahogada por su ingente gasto en infraestructuras. La participación y capacidad movilizadora del servicio fueron seriamente puestas en duda cuando sólo un 0,3% de sus usuarios participaron en la votación de su nuevo sistema de normas, votación promocionada previamente hasta la saciedad. La misma empresa confiesa que el 40% de las personas que abren una ficha la abandonan antes de un mes. Pero no da datos posteriores. La diferencia con twitter (abandonado en el primer mes por el 70% de quienes se apuntan) podría ser tan sólo de ciclo de producto.

El plan Zuckerberg

La visión del CEO de la compañía, Mark Zuckerberg, apunta a convertir en ingresos precisamente aquello por lo que Facebook es un peligro para Internet tal y como la conocemos.

Si Google siente de alguna manera a Facebook como un rival es porque su corazón sigue latiendo a base de indexar información pública. Cuanto hay en facebook es propiedad de facebook, queda fuera de las búsquedas y de adwords, el principal pilar de ingresos de la compañía.

Es ahí donde Zuckerberg ve su punto fuerte: cerrar y centralizar aún más para mantener facebook como el gran jardín virtual de datos personales del mundo. Objetivo: llegar a competir con adwords no en extensión, sino en segmentación. Segmentación que le permitiría, si la gente realmente tuviera por amigos a la red social que le importa y no una colección de cromos de más o menos conocidos, dar resultados de búsquedas a medida de los usuarios y sus gustos, desplazando -o esas son las esperanzas que cuentan a sus accionistas- al mismísimo Google.

Una estrategia suicida

En Internet los que están llegando son siempre más que los que ya están. Eso, que parece un sueño sesentayochista de renovación generacional y juventud permantente, en realidad es lo que permite que los mismos errores se produzcan una y otra vez.

El camino de Zuckerberg no es otro que el de los viejos portales de la época puntocom (1998-2001). Tiene un punto débil fatal: oponer Internet a Facebook y Facebook a Internet, porque necesita que todo ocurra dentro de su recinto cerrado. En su planteamiento, cualquier distracción, cualquier cosa que ocurra fuera, osea en Internet, le haría perder negocio futuro.

Pero los segmentos mayoritarios en facebook son muy jóvenes y/o están muy poco insertos en la cultura digital y la vida en comunidades. Son los más sensibles a las modas y los llamados mediáticos. Facebook se autocondena a replicar cada nueva moda. Anuncia ya un twitter interno. E irá a más.

Como en el angustiado conejo de Alicia, facebook tiene que correr cada vez más rápido para seguir en el mismo sitio. Mientras, la cuenta atrás del capital sigue corriendo. El goteo de usuarios que salen a la Internet libre es permanente. Y alrededor el mundo sigue innovando. La fantasía de sustituir la red por una fiesta inmensa, totalitaria y banal no está lejos de implosionar.

Conservadurismo dañino

versvs — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:28:26 PDT

La viñeta de hoy de Xkcd, mi tira preferida en internet, contiene una frase fantástica:

«Se ha cometido más daño a manos de aquellos aterrorizados por el declive moral de nuestra sociedad del que nunca cometió ese mismo declive social.»

Supongo que lo dañino es el conservadurismo de todos esos que nos pretenden convencer de que «cualquier tiempo pasado fue mejor».

Si hablamos de privacidad y seguridad, la frase también se aplica: nos han hecho más daño muchas de las medidas justificadas en la era post-11S (guerras incluidas, con muchos más muertos que los que hubo en aquellos rascacielos) de lo que nos hicieron los mismos atentados. Y también nuestras libertades se han recortado más como consecuencia de ese pánico (y de la gente dominada por ese pánico) de lo que lo habían hecho los meros atentados del 11S.

RC JOURNAL: Spin Economics

John Robb — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:23:49 PDT

When authorities resort to ~~propaganda~~ confidence building instead of substantive action in response to an actual crisis, you know you are in real trouble (Katrina, Iraq, etc.). We are seeing this again today in regards to the global economic crisis, with media amplified whispers of green shoots and bald pronouncements of immanent recovery.

It won't help. The underlying fundamentals are toxic: US gross debt as a percentage of GDP (currently at 375%) is still climbing, housing prices are still falling (wealth destruction as far as the eye can see), un/underemployment is still rising (an inability to service debt), the financial industry is back to its old tricks (bonuses are shooting through the roof again, etc.), China is still manipulating its currency (dashing prospects of future jobs), commodities (higher costs for daily life) are shooting up again, etc. Worse, what action has been taken is largely short term masking of symptoms and not a cure. Our government "brain-trust" is using all of its financial powder on deprecated 20th Century economic measures to prop up the industries that got us into this crisis: like the greasing of palms in the bloated construction industry (what relation that industry has to our future prosperity is a big mystery) and the flooding of a failing oligopoly (the financial industry) with free money.

In short, the economic decline we just experienced is being primed to continue (perhaps with greater force), when the spin eventually fails to convince. Without a means to rectify our course except for spin economics, the trend towards a post-Westphalian century replete with neo-feudalism and global guerrillas is on an inexorable march.

Britain's fear of protest | Ben Wilson

Ben Wilson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:18:17 PDT

The mob has always been the bogeyman of British leaders – an attitude that persists towards today's peaceful protesters

In our national mythology, John Bull liked to protest. He did it well and with inventive good humour, standing up to the powers that be when they trod on his toes. In truth it has always been exceptionally hard to protest in Britain. In recent months much of the country has been shocked at the response of the police to protests. It's not British, some people say. Others see it as evidence of a looming police state. Most clearly it shows that people in power share a barely articulated belief that civil society is so vulnerable that a puff of breath will send it crashing to the ground.

In this respect our current leaders are in step with history. The mob has always been the bogeyman of leaders in this country. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 haunted the medieval and early modern official mindset, as a horrific example of what happened if you did not act fast to stamp out the first spark of violence. Memories of the civil wars traumatised generations. The watchword of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was "passive resistance" – a weedy hope that bad men would go away if you wished for it hard enough. Certainly, the peaceful nature of the revolution appeared to show that liberty in Britain came from polite discussions. Above all, the lesson learnt was that once the people had a taste of power they would become rabid.

It might sound like a paradox but the fear of protest was closely bound up with the defence of liberty. Liberty in Britain has been most closely associated with privacy and private property. "Your home is your castle" has been the uninspiring slogan of freedom in this country. What could jeopardise this more than the property-less mob? Britain achieved many important liberties early in its history. Politicians and public opinion was very proud of this fact in the 18th and 19th centuries. The happy state of affairs, this organic evolution, could only be disturbed by popular protest. It would destroy all those subtle balances which had developed through the course of history. In the 1930s the lord chief justice could say that "English law does not recognise any special right of public meeting for political or other purposes".

Protest gets written out of the history of the development of civil liberties in this country. Taking the long view of history shows, indeed, that few liberties came from revolution or direct action. Yet that is to misread history. I argued in my previous post that the struggle for liberty is more like a guerrilla campaign than all-out war, the victories of which are obscure and often incomplete. Never is this so clear than when we consider protest. Many of the victories of the 18th and 19th centuries were only achieved because behind a John Wilkes, a William Hone or a Henry Hunt stood a crowd. When the state gradually backed down from restrictive measures and began to reform itself it was partly because the threat of violence stalked in the background. Yet protestors have always been seen as being part of the losing side of history. Wat Tyler, the Levellers, the Chartists, those who clashed with the police on Bloody Sunday in 1887 and many others had a profound impact on our politics without, as it were, winning a match.

So easily are these struggles written out of our history that protest has been seen as un-British, not the done thing. Today the same assumption that freedom and order are intimately connected reigns at the centre of power, even if it is articulated in a different way. It is the assumption that all the great causes of history have been sorted out or will shortly be sorted out by a beneficent government. Why rock the boat? And the presumption in favour of private property has been replaced with a presumption in favour of the peaceable – or quiescent. Antisocial behaviour has become one of the great crimes of the age, and what is more antisocial than blocking a street, picketing a shop, temporarily closing a power station or embarrassing the government by shouting at a visiting world leader? What is more harmful to the supposedly fragile fabric of society than words or actions which may offend? Passivity is, in this view, a civic virtue: a good citizen is someone who keeps the economy chugging along by visiting the mall. What could be less offensive than that?

This is to invent new ways to achieve the same ends. Indeed, protest can sometimes damage democracy. But it is also clear that protest has been crucial to the development of liberty and democracy. Today's unpopular cause is tomorrow's political orthodoxy. Protest is often people's first and most profound involvement with politics.

Protest has rarely had a good press in Britain and I am pessimistic that things will ever change. We live at a time when restrictions on protests in Parliament Square are supported on the grounds of health and safety and because it makes the tourist experience more sanitary. Which is to say, of course, that health'n'safety and the tourist industry trump politics: mind how you go! It has made Westminster an intimating place for anyone who has an opinion. It is little wonder that disengagement with politics is endemic. The government and the police have a daunting arsenal of laws and equipment. It is out of proportion to the threat of disorder and it is fatal to politics.

This is the case in all ages. Our statute book and common law bristle with restrictive laws and always have done. In the volatile 1930s the state was adept at shutting down any manifestation of dissent, from Communist AGMs to humble soapbox orators. Often it just dusted down long-forgotten acts of parliament. A meeting could be broken up by a police constable if he apprehended that a breach of the peace was likely, if it impeded other citizens or if a policeman considered that a person of "reasonable firmness and courage" might be alarmed (to name but three instances). Thus the meek campaigner against unemployment was lumped together with the BUF thug. The fact that the neglected statute book needed to be brought down from the shelf suggests, for the optimistic at least, that willing amnesia on the part of officialdom can allow liberty to thrive. Rare, however, is the government which possesses these liberal instincts or is scared into inaction. Taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut is an ingrained habit for those in power in this country; perhaps it goes back to 1381.

When John Wilkes was on trial the judge tried to silence his rowdy supporters. "This is not the clamour of the rabble, my lord," Wilkes replied, "but the voice of liberty, which must be heard." Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the two, and it has been a repeated failure of British politicians to make the effort. By taking a tough line every time something looks like getting out of hand, the state intimidates the voice of liberty as much as it prevents anarchy.

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The Simpsons Worth More Per Viewer On Hulu Than On Fox

Soulskill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:21:00 PDT

N!NJA writes with this excerpt from PCWorld: "A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com, it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers. Online viewers have to actively seek out the program they want to watch, so advertisers end up with a guaranteed audience for their commercial every time someone clicks play on Hulu or TV.com. Online programs also have an average of 37 seconds of commercials during an episode, while prime-time TV averages nine minutes of ads."