Compare with “Going Galt”
The money [from Megaupload premium accounts] mainly routed through US-based PayPal, which is how Megaupload collected subscriptions from users looking for premium accounts. This wasn’t chump change; the government claims that the Megaupload PayPal account has “received in excess of $110,000,000 from subscribers and other persons associated with Mega Conspiracy.”
(Source: Ars Technica)
Most strikingly, asked about the idea that “rugged individualism” was the key to America’s success, [George Romney] snapped back, “It’s nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”
I just wanted to write to let you know the I, and many of us in the entertainment industry, firmly support the passage of laws like the “PROTECT IP Act,” S. 968. I hope that you aren’t swayed by the obnoxious but relatively unrepresentative Internet campaign to neutralize it, being staged by loud, well-funded voices in the Big Data industry and their cloud of vaguely-informed emailers.
The spectacle disgusts me. People can’t be bothered to protest drone assassinations or Citizens United, but are driven to paroxysms if anyone dares put practical and reasonable sanctions on websites that traffic in pirated content, and tell every manner of mendacious falsehood to scare people into opposing it.
I strongly believe that an Internet with PIPA and PIPA-style regulation is a necessary and good thing for the entertainment industry, for the professionals and craftsmen that work in it, and it is vital for the protection of commercial art as an institution. Copyright infringement threatens to erode the centuries-old art and entertainment economy, and to drag artists and entertainers back into the dark ages of patronage and non-professionalism.
Jamie Hardt, MPSE
“Interlibrary loan”
The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.
You always have to switch off iPhones.
Just throwing it out there, but I remember reading in Tuchman’s The Proud Tower about how in Paris in the 1890s, at the time of the Dreyfus affair, there were hundreds of newspapers, newsletters, magazines, periodical pamphlets, etc. and none of them professed objectivity, so everyone read a few of them, and while the reader might have tended to select sources according to their own biases, at least those biases were explicit and the reader wasn’t subject to bland, utterly decontextualized facts with no usefulness.
The thing about reporting that Mitt Romney said that Obama “apologizes for America” without really going over if it’s true, is that it may be news, but it’s completely non-actionable. Merely repeating Mitt’s bald claim is useless to a reader, objectively. What are they supposed to do with this information?
Too easy
This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?
A recent survey conducted by a UK based divorce website disclosed that 33 per cent behaviour divorce petitions filed cite Facebook as a cause for filling for divorce in 2011. In 2009 this figure was 20 per cent.
