garry’s subposterous

We synthesize happiness, but we think its something to be found.

“The U.S. wants ACTA to force ISPs to "put in place policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content (for example clauses in customers' contracts allowing a graduated response)," according to the [leaked European] Commission memo.”

Let’s reflect on what this means: First, the US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create – despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators.

Second, US negotiators are seeking policies that will harm the US technology industry and citizens across the globe. Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry. The content industry has sought this since the European office of the Motion Picture Association began touting Three Strikes as ISP “best practice” in 2005. Indeed, the MPAAand the RIAA expressly asked for ACTA to include obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes policies in their 2008 submissions to the USTR. The USTR apparently listened and agreed, disregarding the concerns raised by both the US’s major technology and telecom companies and industry associations (who dwarf the US entertainment industry), and public interest groups and libraries.

The most dangerous provision in here is the changing nature of liability for ISP's -- yes, you can get your Internet disconnected forever. This is more extreme than the DMCA and anything ever even proposed by US legislators.

Why are these negotiations closed? And why is the US government acting as RIAA/MPAA lapdog?

60% of women with long, straight hair get second dates—even when the data is normalized for Chinese women being more likely to have long, straight hair. The worst group? Short curly hair, which has only a 5% second-date percentage.

Made by the guy who created "Scratch" -- another great documentary about DJing. Looks like it's playing at the Roxie, down the street from me!

“Wall Street’s pitch to the entrepreneur for the last fifty years has been: you go build your business and operate it and make it valuable. Once you’ve done that, sell it, liquidate it, and turn the cash over to us; we will diversify your wealth, spread it around, extend it, because we know how to do that really well and you don’t. Your money is not only safe with us, it’s safer with us than it would be if you stayed in the game running a business somewhere out there in the middle of America.”

And the Great Recession has put the lie to that pitch, my friend said. From here on out, I’m re-constructing more than paraphrasing:

"Those who bought the Wall Street pitch have lost forty to sixty percent of their net worth. And so it will become clear once again that the way to gain wealth, keep it and expand it is to do it the way the robber barons of the 19th Century did it — by owning and controlling operating businesses. It’s fine to hire others to come in and manage them, but if you want to keep your wealth, you have to own businesses that turn on the lights (real or virtual) every day. Diversification doesn’t mean stocks and bonds, it means owning and operating several or many different businesses. This is also the best hedge against inflation, because you will always be paid in the current currency; and you won’t be having Wall Street taking its cut, coming and going, up years and down."

The rules change when it all falls down.

* Space-saving HP Slimline desktop (s5212y)
* Thin-profile 18.5" LCD monitor (w1858)
* Media-savvy HP laptop (G60-535DX)
* Compact HP Mini netbook (110-1125NR)
* Speedy NETGEAR Wireless-G router (WGR614)
* Seamless in-home setup of the PCs and router by Geek Squad (4000954811)

What the heck? You can get THREE computers for $1200? That's just outrageous. The desktop doesn't even sound that bad -- 3GB RAM, 2.5ghz dual core Pentium.

I am so glad I went software instead of hardware, though. If this isn't proof computer hardware is commodity, I don't know what is.

Think about this every day:

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. ~ Ayn Rand

If you aren’t comfortable with this attitude, it’s hard to be awesome. Sorry. You can be good enough without being assertive, but to a large extent, being awesome requires that you initiate, take action, and chart your own course through the norms of mediocrity.

I'm overdosing on Ayn Rand quotes (two per week is a bit much) but this is a great blog post by Chris Guillebeau.

I was sitting in a bar one night, talking rather loudly about a person I hated -- and a man with a beard sat down beside me, and he said amiably, "Why don't you have him killed?

When we started Auctomatic in mid-2007, eBay was dominant but faltering, PayPal was lumbering along without any innovation, Facebook was amazing everyone (and scaring Google) with their growth, the iPhone was reshaping the cell phone industry, and everyone was talking about Twitter. Two and a half years on, that still sounds like a reasonable assessment of things.

Take a breath!