Category: News

It’s been many years since we first wrote about how stores like Walmart were dealing with ridiculous copyright laws by telling employees to simply not allow the printing of “professional-looking” photos, just in case they were covered by someone else’s copyright. Last year, a story popped up about a Walmart employee not letting a family print their own old family photos for this reason. It looks like we’ve got yet another such story. greenbird was the first of a few of you to send in this story about Walmart (yet again) not allowing the printing of family photos (this time for a funeral, which makes it that much more tragic), with copyright used as the reason. Once again, the employee made some dumb statements, such as saying “copyright is forever.”

But, just like last time, I have to say that we shouldn’t blame the Walmart employee, who is just trying to protect her job, and lives in a world where copyright maximalists constantly push this sort of message. It’s not her fault, it’s the fault of current copyright law, which makes such things seems reasonable, and the ongoing effort by lobbyists and politicians to only push copyright law further in that direction.

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Bplay has launched a new line of city themes. They’re pretty basic themes with changing backgrounds and easy to read icons, but they do a good job of representing your favorite city.

Embrace Los Angeles
Embrace New York
Embrace Paris
Embrace London
Embrace Rome
Embrace Berlin
Embrace Vancouver
Embrace Tokyo
Embrace Beijing
Embrace Barcelona

Check out all of their featured cities here.

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

Google doesn’t really like big product and feature launches. It’s about to have one very, very soon as it unleashes Google Chrome OS into the world, but for the most part its products and services evolve slowly with small but regular updates. Sometimes though, these small features may be a lot more important than they would appear at first glance. Take today’s announcement of a very small feature available now in Gmail labs notifying users that their chat buddies are currently connected using Android-powered devices.

“Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they’re not really “online online” — they just have chat open on their Android phones. Turn on Green Robot, a new experiment in Gmail Labs, and you’ll see a robot icon next to people who are currently using Android phones,” Chad Yoshikawa, a Google software engineer, wrote.

Moreover, Google has a perfectly legitimate example of why the feature is useful: “when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages.” The idea makes perfect sense, typing on most mobile devices is not exactly fun and the small feature can make a lot of d… (read more)

Patenting podcasting? You’ve got to be kidding. Yet a company called Volomedia just got the Patent Office to grant them such exclusive rights.

EFF and the law firm of Howrey, LLP aren’t willing to just sit by and watch. This patent could threaten the vibrant community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. We want to put a stop to it, but we need your help.

The Volomedia patent covers “a method for providing episodic media.” It’s a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners. Right now, just about anyone can create their own on-demand talk radio program, earning an audience on the strength of their ideas. But more costs and hassle means that podcasting could go the way of mainstream radio — with only the big guys able to afford an audience. And we’d have a bogus patent to blame.

In order to bust this patent, we are looking for additional “prior art” — or evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use before November 19, 2003. In particular, we’re looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes. You can read the entire prior art request here, and if you have something that could help, please send it to [email protected] or fill out the form on our Volomedia page.

EFF’s Patent-Busting Project has taken on ten of the worst free-speech and innovation crushing software patents approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Eight of the ten have had a bite taken out of them so far, with two busted entirely, one narrowed, four reexams granted by the Patent office, and another one invalidated by the courts. We weren’t looking to add to our list of the “worst of the worst,” but this one was so bad we had to add it as a special bonus offender, and we can’t wait to shoot it down. As Renee DuBord Brown of Howrey said, “Overbroad patents deter innovation. Congress specifically authorized the reexamination process to correct such errors, and we are looking forward to working with EFF on this reexam.”

Bioware is looking to replicate the success of the Warden’s Keep DLC with a new Dragon Age: Origins downloadable pack coming this winter.The upcoming …

The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here’s a look at the top 5 supercomputers, their specs, and some cool photos.

There is a free app in App World called Hockey Scores that lets you check NHL scores across the league. The app is updated frequently but it’s not clear whether it takes advantage of the Push APIs from RIM, which would push the scores to the device in near-real time.

Hockey Scores is free in App World and available for almost every device.

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

A lot of eyes were on Sony at the Media Investor Conference quite recently, where the company revealed their plans of world domination increasing pro…

Koei has finally announced a US release date for the home console versions of Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce, setting it just a few days before the rec…

How do we create faith in ourselves?

Excellent question!

The answer; destress yourself.

Faith is the confident belief or trust in something.

I just created that meaning from the top of my head. But, it is true isn’t it? Faith is the confident belief or trust in something. I like that.

If you have a lot of stress, stress at work, stress at home, stress with finances, stress in your relationships, or just difficulty coping with stress, chances are you do not have faith.

When I say faith, I mean faith in yourself, faith that things will be okay, or faith that you can handle your stress. What is stress? Stress is the consequences of our thoughts of doubt, fear, and worry. Therefore, the opposite of stress is our consequences from our thoughts of faith or the confident belief or trust in something.

Let me just clarify that I am, in a general sense, talking about negative, everyday stress which is distress. Although, this can apply to eustress, as well, which is positive stress. But, I am not speaking about cumulative stress (burnout), or critical (incident) stress, at this time. With that said, if you have stress, chances are you have doubt, fear, and worry.

Stress at work is caused by thoughts of doubt, fear, and worry about work. Stress at home is caused by doubt, fear, and worry about home. Stress with finances is caused by doubt, fear, and worry about finances. Stress in relationships is caused by doubt, fear, and worry about relationships. Difficulty coping with stress is caused by doubt, fear, and worry about outcomes.

Doubt, fear, and worry are thoughts and they are usually habitual thoughts. What I mean by this is that sometimes, or most of the time, we have a habit of doubt, fear, or worry about our situation. Back to the question, how do we create faith in ourselves?

We create faith in ourselves by discovering what we want out of life, what our purpose is, and living what we want and living our purpose. For example, I want to enjoy life (this has many meanings to me but I will save it for another post) and my purpose is to help create happiness, energy, and vitality by teaching people to find joy in their lives (destress yourself). If you do not know what you want or what your purpose is you can find out by taking our destress yourself class.

Living with what we want and our purpose is not a destination, it is a journey. Therefore, we are constantly moving towards what we want by living our purpose. We can create faith in ourselves by finding out what we want, finding out our purpose, and setting goals to obtain this. Working towards this, everyday, will help you find joy and faith in yourself. If you are living in the constant state of going nowhere, doing the same ole thing, living the same ole life, then you may not be creating faith in yourself. But, by moving forward, in life, setting your goals, having a vision, and living your purpose, faith in yourself will come because of the great accomplishments you will make.

Look back one year ago, three years ago, or even five years ago. Are you doing the same ole thing or are you moving forward in life? How do we create faith? Discover what you want out of life, move towards it, and live it. Discover your purpose, move towards it, and live it. Set goals towards what you want, using your purpose, and keep moving forward, everyday.

If you don’t know what you want or would like to create faith in yourself, I can help you, for free. When you learn to destress yourself you discover what you want out of life and create faith in yourself. Subscribe to this blog, sign up for our free weekly newsletter at destressyourself.com, and download our free audio mp3’s and you will begin the journey of destressing yourself. You have it in you!

Hope this is helpful. Until next post… Don’t forget to have fun and be playful, it is in your nature.

Elizabeth

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Picture a house with absolutely filthy exterior basement windows, the kind that just barely peek out above ground level. The owner can’t see through the things, and they need a thorough washing. He could grab the bucket and a rag and squat or kneel down to commence cleaning. He could make it easy on himself, but for some bizarre reason, he doesn’t.

Instead, he spends the entire day slaving away with a shovel and a pick axe, hacking at the earth to loosen it and shoveling the loose dirt out. A deep hole appears, about eight feet in depth and wide enough to accommodate him and a ladder.  In goes the ladder, and he follows with the wash bucket and rag. Dirty, grimy, sweaty, and disheveled, he ascends the ladder to finally reach the basement windows. He manages to clean them, but his alternate self in a parallel universe – that guy who decided to just kneel down to wash the windows – has clean windows, a killer tan from spending hours at the beach doing pushups and sprints, a couple racks of ribs on the barbecue, and a nice glass of Cab paired with a wedge of French brie. He enjoyed his day, while the ladder enthusiast had to work for hours just to arrive at the same point.

At the end of the day, the windows are clean in both instances. But which method made the most sense? Which method featured a whole lot of redundant BS, and which method allowed for plenty of free time?

“Diggin’ a hole to install a ladder to wash the basement windows” is a phrase I love to use to describe the inanity and redundancy of contemporary conceptions of fitness. Sometimes our methodologies are inherently ridiculous, like with the Treadmobile, a mobile treadmill, or the StreetStrider, a mobile elliptical with endorsements from The Biggest Loser (need I say more?). Anyone can recognize the absurdity of taking a stationary fitness machine that is itself an attempt to recreate a real world movement – like the treadmill tries to mimic running – and turning it into a functioning way to get around the environment. As if having a pair of thick, clunky rubber soles between you and the ground weren’t bad enough, now people are actually using treadmills to stay as removed from nature as humanly possible. And the elliptical is already a ridiculous looking contraption (easy on the joints, sure, but it might replace or even divorce you from real, natural movement patterns like swimming that are equally easy on the joints), but if you do like to use it, just please keep it in the gym. No need to go flailing all over the road.

But on a more serious note, far too many people dig the proverbial hole for themselves when they try to improve their fitness levels by following CW’s lead. Take the Chronic Cardio crowd, for example. Most people still buy the line that running sixty minutes every day is the key to health, fitness, longevity, and happiness. They run those sixty minutes – hating perhaps fifty-five of them – every night to lose weight and get fit and to burn the all-important calories. Sure, some calories get burnt, but so do all their glycogen stores, stores that require restocking with tons of carbs, the more refined and delicious the better. They’ve just come home from a grueling seven mile run and they feel like maybe they deserve a little break, a little treat for all that hard work – so they order a large pizza and wolf the entire thing down, followed by a bowl of ice cream. They wake up feeling bloated (but man are those glycogen stores ready to go!) and horrible, which leads to mild self-flagellation and the decision to “hit the treadmill extra hard tonight” to make up for all the carbs. The same thing happens all over again. The wheels are in motion. This vicious, endless, Sisyphean cycle of Chronic Cardio and carb refueling leads to weight gain and broken spirits (“why can’t I lose the weight?!”) – and the broken, overweight, totally confused about what works and what doesn’t nation we see today.

That’s not to say the Primal fitness community doesn’t have its hole diggers. Some of us – and I’m guilty of this from time to time – make the mistake of thinking more is always better. More pain, more sprints, more weight, more sweat, perhaps even more vomit – are encouraging signs that good work is being done. Now, I’m a huge proponent of compound strength building movements, sprints, hikes, and anything that engages the entire body and works it hard to the core. These exercises are meant to tax and test our strength and our stamina, but there is a point of diminishing returns. There are occasions where – even if you’re doing Primal approved exercises – you run the risk of compromising your health and fitness. The body needs rest at times, and it possesses a pretty effective subconscious feedback system to let you know when it needs that rest. If you’ve lost count of how many hill sprints you’ve done, and each “sprint” has devolved into a plodding uphill jog, it’s time to stop. You’re not doing yourself any good; you’re only hurting your body and increasing your recovery/downtime. If that ain’t diggin’ a hole for yourself, I don’t know what is.

Conventional notions about what constitutes an effective fitness regimen always make me shake my head and throw up my hands. I see people doing ridiculous, ineffective routines with every fiber of their being with nothing to show for it except some lingering injury or a lighter wallet. I can’t help but feel a bit superior, maybe even a tad patronizing, when unbending dedication to a failed, counterproductive fitness methodology persists. But that quickly disappears when I remember that it used to be me. I used to be the most ardent supporter of Conventional Wisdom around. Even when my ultra running and endurance training was physically wearing me down and forcing me into terrible dietary habits, I told myself this was normal. I assumed, despite mountains of evidence (both personal, anecdotal, and clinical) to the contrary, that I was ensuring a long, active life for myself. I think a lot of people are in that situation, so I empathize.

Are you engaging in redundant, inane workouts that go nowhere? Are you working out on a regular basis and failing to see any results?

You may be diggin’ a hole to install a ladder to wash the basement windows, when you could forget the shovel, lose the ladder, grab your wash bucket and handle business.

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Related posts:

1. Washboard Abs on a High-Fat Diet, No Ab Workouts and No Cardio?
2. Statin Insanity

11-12 December 2009
Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB

We are pleased to inform you that it is now possible to register in order to attend the conference on Deportation and Development of Citizenship on 11-12 December at the University of Oxford (map).

The aim of this conference is to encourage interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship on deportation, broadly conceived as the lawful expulsion power of states, both as an immigration control and as a social control mechanism. The conference will serve as a vehicle for bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, including politics, sociology, history, international relations, law, criminology and anthropology, interested in the study of deportation.

Confirmed guest speakers include Prof. Daniel Kanstroom, Prof. Antje Ellermann, Prof. Annemarie Sammartino, Prof. Catherine Dauvergne, Prof. Deirdre Moloney and Dr. Darshan Vigneswaran.

The programme of the conference (PDF file) is available and you can register online.

If you have any questions, please e-mail [email protected]

• Conference
• Conference programme (provisional) (PDF file)

We’ve seen recently how some companies have turned copyright into something that certainly approximates a tool for extortion. Rather than threatening to break up your store with a baseball bat, they threaten to sue you if you don’t pay them for infringing on their copyrights. Even in the cases where the copyright has been infringed, this whole process seems incredibly sleazy and underhanded — and it’s even worse when it’s done against those who are clearly “accidental” or “unaware” infringers. Or you can take it even further: using this method to demand a non-negotiable payment from a church.

Reader Sam Cook writes in to let us know how a woman named Linda Amstutz is going around threatening pretty much anyone who posts her essay/poem called “If my body were a car.” It’s apparently one of those essays that gets regularly passed around the internet — often without attribution. While you can understand why the author might get a bit upset about it getting passed around without attribution, it appears that Amstutz has taken it to another level. She could alert those who are posting it with the evidence that she’s the author and ask, nicely, for proper attribution. She could also then use that fame and celebrity to get other commissioned writing projects, or maybe a book.

But no. She just sends them bills.

She (or, rather, her “literary agent” Mary Taylor Smith) sends nasty letters to people demanding immediate payment of $750, significantly more than anyone would ever pay for such reprint rights — using the fact that statutory copyright infringement violations have a $750/infringement starting point (which, we already know is ridiculous). Of course, Taylor Smith never seems to suggest that anyone might have a fair use exemption. She just sends the letter and an invoice demanding payment.

A couple years ago, the well-known author Orson Scott Card found out about Amstutz and Taylor Smith’s effort to abuse copyright law, and wrote up a blog post that pretty accurately described the picture. He notes that those who are posting the essay are almost certainly infringing on the copyright, but that’s no excuse for Amstutz’s actions, whom he refers to as “a moderately talented but extremely greedy, litigious, and self-righteous author:”

Now, her essay was originally published in Ozark Senior Living magazine. You can bet that she did not receive $750 for first publication. She may not have been paid at all.

Furthermore, $750 is a ridiculously high price for reprint rights for essays. I have stories reprinted all the time — sometimes award-winning stories twenty times the length of “If My Body Were a Car,” and for which I was originally paid many times $750. But the reprint rights usually go for $300 or less, and that’s fair.

Besides the money, you see, I get to have that story out there collecting new readers for me…

The web is full of people who don’t understand that websites are publications. Nobody gave them a course in copyright law before they put stuff up online. Most of them are decent folks who, as soon as someone tells them they’re doing something wrong, will immediately correct their error.

But Amstutz is not interested in understanding human failings. Instead, she has seized upon a means of terrifying people into paying her ridiculous amounts of money.

It’s as if you went into a store, inadvertently broke a vase worth $75, only to find that the store manager is going to make you pay $750 on the spot, or else you’ll be hauled off to jail for vandalism and fined $30,000.

Yep. $30,000. Because that’s what Mary Taylor Smith, Amstutz’s agent, misleadingly tells you you’ll have to pay. Here’s her exact language: “The minimum damages for copyright infringement in a court of law is $750 and is punishable up to $30,000, plus attorney fees and court costs.”

Yes, but that $30,000 is a maximum. There is zero chance that a rational court would charge a mom-and-pop non-profit website anywhere near that amount for infringing the copyright of a piece of writing that probably earned $100 or less on first publication. Especially when they took the essay down the moment they realized it was a copyright infringement.

Amstutz also has a rather obnoxious webpage up about this topic, saying that she’s building a list of all the people who refused to pay and will soon sue them all (at which point she’ll also “rescind” the invoice for $750, and try to get much more in court. She also has a “lesson” in copyright which gets a lot of the details wrong (she calls infringing stealing, makes no mention of fair use at all, and says you can never use someone else’s words without permission, etc.)

Card points out that this does, indeed, feel like extortion, even if it is infringement:

Amstutz brags about just how much money she intends to extort from anyone who trips over her essay.

Because that’s what it seems like to me: extortion. Yes, republishing her essay is an infringement of copyright. But most people who do it are ignorant of what they’re doing. Amstutz preys on these people, hovering to see who falls into the trap, and then threatening them and bullying them to pay her far more than the reprint rights are worth, under threat of maximum fines they would never have to pay.

There are plenty of people like this in the world — vultures who prey on people who make mistakes. I’ll wager that Amstutz makes far more money from legal extortion than she makes as a writer. She has left writing far behind. Now she’s just a bully, like a big kid threatening little kids so they’ll turn over their lunch money.

Card, as he did when JK Rowling started bullying the author of the Harry Potter Lexicon, points out how unoriginal the idea of Amstutz essay is in the first place. He points out that plenty of others have written similar things. While he says, correctly, that this doesn’t change the fact that her specific expression is covered by copyright, it does raise questions about why Amstutz thinks her work is so special. His suggested solution: stop posting or forwarding her writings and return her “to obscurity where she belongs.”

Finally, he shows how an author should respond to such flattery, by granting everyone the right to forward his works online, as long as they properly credit it. He does ask that people ask permission to repost his essays, but says he’ll often grant the right, free of charge with little hassle.

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Purchasing a BlackBerry is a serious decision. Not only does the device cost up to $200, but you’re then committing to two years of service. We discussed the total BlackBerry cost a while ago. Voice plan, messaging plan, data plan — it all adds up over two years. Earlier this year we saw a prepaid carrier, MetroPCS, launch the BlackBerry Curve 8330. The service cost $50 per month for unlimited voice and messaging, plus BIS ($60 for BES), making it cheaper than most other BlackBerry service plans. It’s attractive because there is no commitment — not in the contractual sense, at least. The device cost over $400, and that kind of investment can keep you tied to the service. It appears T-Mobile is trying a similar gambit.

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University of Central Oklahoma students swept all three awards in the Oklahoma Campus Compact’s statewide Civic Responsibility Contest.…“The students’ work highlights a critical component of our democracy,” said Gina Wekke, assistant vice chancellor of Academic Affairs for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education and executive director of Oklahoma Campus Compact.

»Read the entire article in NewsOK.

Some of us like music a lot. We love it so much that we buy it from the Internet, we take it with us to different places, and we just can’t get enough of it, no matter where we are. Some of us even have some huge and pretty impressive collections of various kinds of music. Rock, pop, techno, classic, each one has its different style and approach to the listener.

If one of us truly wants to become a fan, they have to know that each band has its own story, and some of them are pretty impressive. But, nowadays, the music is not just about fun, and singing, it’s a very big industry, where a lot of money is earned, and egos are massive. Some people became stars really quickly, some have been trying to make a name for themselves in the industry for years. But, in order to do that, they need to be promoted and make contact with the individuals.

Music Explorer FX is a program that allows you to search the Internet for various pieces of information about a specific band, and view others that relate to the genre that the band that you selected plays.

The Looks

I can say that Music Explorer FX is a piece of software created in Java, using the webstart technology. That means it’s lightweight, and very easy to use. The interface is truly one of the most simple I have ever seen. It’s comp… (read more)