Tag: copyright

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  • Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown notice to an official Warner Music video channel. I think I need some popcorn.
  • From @david_colquhoun via @BadAstronomer:

    Guardian science editor’s daughter gets measles. He’s angry with the anti-vaccination brigade.

  • I nearly mistyped “foreign” as “foregin.” It sounds like an appetizer you should eat before drinking gin.
  • Senator Arlen Specter’s party switch is largely symbolic. He didn’t toe the Republican party line, so why expect he’ll toe Democratic line?

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Scientists have built a computer model of the Neanderthal vocal tract based on fossils, and have simulated the kinds of sounds they could have produced. Ever since I read Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax novels, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there were two distinct human species, living side by side, for perhaps thousands of years. What happened to them? Did our ancestors kill them off, or interbreed with them? Did they fail to adapt to a changing climate? (via Slashdot)

On a related note, it seems that Expelled, the anti-science propaganda film that actually invokes Godwin’s Law by claiming that “believing” evolution leads to Nazis, opens this weekend. I’m curious to see how badly they misrepresent things (it’s always best to look for yourself, instead of just taking other people at their word—that’s the whole idea behind science, after all), but I can’t bring myself to support them by actually giving them money. Meanwhile, Expelled Exposed is interesting reading.

In software, dria.org explains why the AwesomeBar is awesome. That’s the nickname given to the new address bar in Firefox 3, which lets you search your browser history as you type. It’s the reason I never went back to Firefox 2 after trying out one of the later FX3 betas, and why I’ve installed Fx3b5 on two more machines. The Opera 9.5 previews have a similar feature, but Firefox’s implementation is better visually. It’s easier to spot the page you want, and over time, it learns which pages you visit more often. It’s so much faster to type a word or two than to hunt through the bookmarks menu. (via Asa Dotzler)

IEEE has an article on how copyright law applies to websites, What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Finally, ***Dave relates an incredibly cool story of going to see Avenue Q and what happened after the show. I had no idea that (at least in New York), the “Give Me Your Money” segment was actually collecting for a charity.

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I’d known that artist Roy Lichtenstein‘s most famous works were done in the style of gigantic comic book panels. Something I didn’t know was that many of those paintings weren’t just in the style of comic panels, but were blown-up copies of specific panels from actual comic books (done, of course, by other artists).

An art teacher named David Barsalou has been tracking down the originals. He has a website, Deconstructing Lichtenstein, which displays dozens of actual comic panels side by side with the corresponding Lichtenstein paintings.

Some are nearly exact. Some depart a bit more, but many of those actually keep the same dialogue or narration. And yet, somehow Lichtenstein’s work has been hailed for decades as “original.”

(via A Distant Soil)

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Looking at the list of “most popular” links on Del.icio.us, it seems someone has scanned the entire Book of Bunny Suicides and its sequel, both by Andy Riley.

Good grief, people—you can pick up the book for $7.00 at any bookstore. I can understand posting a couple of excerpts, but from what I can tell, these people have scanned and posted the entire book. They haven’t even credited the source! In the blog postings that show up on a “bunny suicides” search, most of them don’t even seem to know where the cartoons are from. Heck, even with pirated MP3s you usually know who sang the song.

Google has pulled a few of the sites from their index in response to a DMCA complaint. (Interestingly, Google themselves linked to the Chilling Effects entry.)

It always amazes me how rude people can be.

Book of Bunny Suicides Return of the Bunny Suicides