I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds - way more than most people seem to consider a plateful*. Some of them have three or four (or more) posts a day, but some of them update only very sporadically - which means when they do, it’s a rare treat.

A good example is Kevin Kelly’s ‘Street Use’. Named after that William Gibson quote I’m so fond of, it collects examples of people solving real-world problems using objects in ways that they were never originally intended for.

Today, we discover how to transport twenty live chickens on the back of a bicycle:

That’s ingenuity, Chinese style.

[* That's not a boast, just a statement of fact. Or possibly a cry for help, looked at another way.]

Well, it looks like I got my wish granted, although I’m not going to attempt to claim that my own post had anything to do with it. But people are starting to talk about DRM, digital media and the future of the genre. Continue reading “The DRM debate picks up steam”

Ok, I’m going to come right out and say it: I believe in global warming and climate change, and I believe its cause to be rooted in human activity. Continue reading “Mass-transit musings”

I sure do. If I pay for a song, and album, a game or other software, I want my fair use rights as provided by law. Thing is, the media industry doesn’t want to give me those rights. Thanks to the internet and it’s cornucopia of tools for distibution of data and content, the lazy old-fashioned business models of the music film and games industries are failing. Rather than pull their fingers out and move with the times, they’d rather take the easy option of treating their customers like criminals. Continue reading “Do you hate DRM?”