Arnvidr

gewg_ writes:

from the How-the-Other-Half-Lives dept.

The Center for American Progress reports

Since he began his minimum wage challenge on Sunday, former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, now president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, has had eggs and toast, a bowl of cereal with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a banana. On Monday, he came to work with a bologna and cheese sandwich and a banana. "I'm not sure what I'm going to have for supper," he told ThinkProgress.

This is not a typical menu for him. But given that he can only spend $77 a week while he's taking the challenge, which asks lawmakers to live on a typical full-time minimum wage minus average taxes and housing expenses for a week, he has to "be sensitive about everything that I buy." Eggs are fairly cheap, he reasoned, and "I have found out that bananas don't cost a whole lot, so I stocked up on bananas." He hasn't eaten any other fruits or salads because they're too expensive. For the remaining five days of his challenge, "I don't think I'll be eating very healthy," he said. "Bologna's a lot cheaper than ham. I've been eating [quite] a bit of bread."

[...]

He came down with a cold but was lucky enough to find Tylenol and Afrin nasal spray in his cabinet already. "I don't think I would have been able to buy that Afrin nasal spray" on the challenge, he noted. "I never think about what medicine costs if i need it... But some people have to think constantly about how they spend their money, and their quality of life is quite different than mine."

Strickland will be joined by some current lawmakers this week, including Democratic Reps. Jan Schakowsky (IL), Tim Ryan (OH), and Keith Ellison (MN)

[...]

The hope is that those who take the challenge get a taste of what life is like on a low wage, even if it's temporary and they can go back to their normal lifestyles after a week. "I think it's important for those of us in these leadership positions that get elected by our constituents to represent their views from time to time to take a challenge such as this," Rep. Ryan said on the call, "to make sure we really are not just understanding this in an intellectual way but really understand the deep challenges that people face." It's meant to "bring awareness to this issue," he said.

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Friendship is an amazing thing.  Makes people explode right out of cars for no apparent reason. Incredible.

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Oh God, make it stop.

It’s been proven that there is no way to not explode given those circumstances.

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Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

An anonymous reader writes: We've known for a while: the War on Drugs isn't working. Scientists, journalists, economists, and politicians have all argued against continuing the expensive and ineffective fight. Now, the World Health Organization has said flat out that nations should work to decriminalize the use of drugs. The recommendations came as part of a report released this month focusing on the prevention and treatment of HIV. "The WHO's unambiguous recommendation is clearly grounded in concerns for public health and human rights. Whilst the call is made in the context of the policy response to HIV specifically, it clearly has broader ramifications, specifically including drug use other than injecting. In the report, the WHO says: 'Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize injection and other use of drugs and, thereby, reduce incarceration. ...Countries should ban compulsory treatment for people who use and/or inject drugs." The bottom line is that the criminalization of drug use comes with substantial costs, while providing no substantial benefit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Frozach Submitted

Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon blog post defending this accusation has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining throughput from network providers. Level3, a major ISP that interconnects with Verizon's networks, responded by showing a diagram that visualizes the underpowered interconnect problem and explaining why Verizon's own post indicates how it restricts data flow. Level3 also offered to pay for the necessary upgrades to Verizon hardware: "... these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that's the case, we'll buy one for them. Maybe they can't afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that's the case, we'll provide it. Heck, we'll even install it." I'm curious to see Verizon's response to this straightforward accusation of throttling paying users (which tech-savvy readers were quick to confirm).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wantkitteh writes:

A one week emergency process to pass laws to fill the legal gap left behind by the striking down of the EU Data Retention Directive has resulted in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill being passed in the House of Commons. The bill received support from all three major parties and was passed with a huge majority, despite criticism for the process and content of the bill:

"The government won a large majority of 387 on its proposed Commons timetable for the legislation, as MPs agreed by 436 votes to 49 to complete consideration of the bill in one day. MPs subsequently approved the general principles of the bill at second reading by 498 votes to 31, a government majority of 467. It later passed its third and final reading by a comparable margin of 416 votes."

During the very short lead time between the announcement of the bill and it's reading in the House of Commons, senior labour leadership expressed support for the content of the bill but reservations about the speed of the process. The Conservative MP David Davis made a speech in the House of Commons in which he also criticised the process, describing it as "entirely improper", likening it to "democratic banditry resonant of a rogue state", and accusing infighting between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat factions of the ruling coalition of causing the three month.

The legislation also drew fire from many civil liberties groups and commentators. The Open Rights Group post a scathing analysis of the bill criticising the emergency nature of the bill and asserting that the bill will significantly extend data retention scope and enforcement jurisdiction, to the contrary of previous assurances by Home Secretary Theresa May that the bill would closely replicate the powers of the withdrawn EU Data Retention Directive. Isabella Sankey, the Policy Director for Liberty commented on the group's blog that this was a closed-doors agreement between the party leaders designed to evade democratic oversight and pass legislation equivalent to the previously abandoned Draft Communications Data Bill, otherwise known as the "Snooper's Charter".

The bill has now moved on the House of Lords, where it must also be approved before it becomes law.

UPDATE 17-07-14: The bill has now cleared the House of Lords and is becoming law. The criticism to the timetable for passing it has resulted in the insertion into the bill by the opposition of a six-monthly requirement for the Interception of Communications Commissioner to report on usage of the powers granted and to ensure that "same as the EU DRD" does genuinely mean that. It also means the EU Court of Justice's assertion that the EU DRD "[entailed] a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data, without that interference being limited to what is strictly necessary" now applies to this new law as well.

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Holy shit, is this really my first new comic in 9 1/2 months? Time flies, I had no clue I had been gone for so long. Don’t expect any regular updates, but I may be putting out occasional comics. I have decided that I won’t be starting another comic, whatever I do, no matter how dramatic a change in style and humor, it will be hosted here on endlessorigami.com

 

… And so, undeterred by technological advancements they both feared and misunderstood, the major labels continued their quest to "disrupt" fair use and further dwindle into irrelevance. [If you feel you're missing the first half of that sentence, these two posts will help you out.]

As noted recently, Soundcloud has given Universal Music Group the power to directly take down content, bypassing the site's internal takedown process as well as the few remedies it offers users who wish to dispute deletions. YouTube has also given UMG this same level of access, again bypassing the normal notice and takedown system.

While sites may claim (as Soundcloud did) that they need to give powerful rights holders direct access in order to comply with the DMCA, this simply isn't true. Utilizing the normal notice-and-takedown system would be more than adequate. The only thing giving a label direct access does is increase the amount of abuse.

It's long been noted that the DMCA takedown process tends to encourage rights holders to disregard fair use and fire off notices. The toothless "perjury" language included at the bottom of every takedown notice is almost never enforced, making false or bad claims painless for those sending takedowns.

UMG, with its direct access, certainly isn't going to consider fair use when it starts pulling the plug on content, as one YouTube remix artist discovered. Elisa Kreisinger has been remixing cultural touchstones for years. This video -- one that never even made it past YouTube's upload process -- was no different.

Last August, I saw Jay Z’s HBO mini-documentary commemorating his 6-hour “unprecedented performance experience” of “Picasso Baby” at Pace Gallery. The movie was ripe for remixing: Within the first minute, Jay Z reflects on the similarities between performance art and his usual concert performances, arguing that art galleries have separated art from mass culture, presumably unintentionally.

With one simple twist, I recontextualized select scenes of his performance and set it to Taylor Swift’s “22." The remix illustrates how both Jay Z and Swift use their status as outsiders to relate to audiences despite being very much insiders. [...] I uploaded the mashup to YouTube on Aug. 5, 2013, and it was immediately blocked globally. Ten months later, I finally uncovered the reason.

The reason was simply this: where fair use could be reasonably argued, UMG (and its bots/lawyers) saw nothing more than two of its videos being "stolen."

It turns out no defense would have revived my video. YouTube had cut a private deal that gave Universal Music Group the power to take down any video, even those videos (like mine and countless others, including creators as diverse as Patrick McKay and Megaupload) that didn’t require Universal’s permission in the first place.

The only plus side was that's UMG's deletion didn't result in a strike against Kreisinger's account. But that's of little comfort when fair use is steamrolled by "contractual obligations" YouTube (or Soundcloud) really don't need to have in place to stay compliant with the DMCA.

When fair use gets damaged, so does free speech.

Fair use prevents rightsholders from silencing critics with the threat of a copyright infringement lawsuit.   By giving UMG the ability to take down videos that use their content regardless of fair use, YouTube has given UMG sweeping power to control what is – and is not – said about UMG and UMG artists. UMG should not be asking for this kind of power, and YouTube should not be granting it.

Labels and copyright industry lobbyists love to call these sorts of deals "voluntary." But they aren't. They're coercive. Lobbyists lean on politicians and politicians lean on internet services to do more to help out struggling, billion-dollar industries. Rather than see IP laws get any worse (or target them any more specifically), they comply with increasingly ridiculous demands. And the users pay the price by having their uploads deleted, their accounts closed and their mouths shut -- all without any genuine level of recourse.

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mpicpp writes about a new Twitter bot that reports all of the anonymous Wikipedia edits being made from the US Senate and House of Representatives. Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter "bot" that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament's internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress. "The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool," Summers wrote in his personal blog. "So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them." The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More action.

lhsi writes:

Abstract: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10336-014-1098-9

By re-examining a fossil of Scansoriopteryx (which means "climbing wing"), a sparrow-size creature from the Jurassic era, researchers believe that the commonly held belief that birds evolved from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs that gained the ability to fly is false. The birdlike fossil is actually not a dinosaur, as previously thought, but much rather the remains of a tiny tree-climbing animal that could glide.

Through their investigations, the researchers found a combination of plesiomorphic or ancestral non-dinosaurian traits along with highly derived features. It has numerous unambiguous birdlike features such as elongated forelimbs, wing and hind limb feathers, wing membranes in front of its elbow, half-moon shaped wrist-like bones, bird-like perching feet, a tail with short anterior vertebrae, and claws that make tree climbing possible. The researchers specifically note the primitive elongated feathers on the forelimbs and hind limbs. This suggests that Scansoriopteryx is a basal or ancestral form of early birds that had mastered the basic aerodynamic manoeuvres of parachuting or gliding from trees.

Their findings validate predictions first made in the early 1900's that the ancestors of birds were small, tree-dwelling archosaurs which enhanced their incipient ability to fly with feathers that enabled them to at least glide. This "trees down" view is in contrast with the "ground up" view embraced by many palaeontologists in recent decades that birds derived from terrestrial theropod dinosaurs.

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More art.

Frozach Submitted