Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country’s officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!

Write Them Now! I urge you to vote no on ACTA and to communicate its severe problems to your colleagues. ACTA’s vague language locks us into obsolete copyright and patent laws, preventing democracies from updating their laws to unlock new economic and social opportunities.It criminalizes harmless remixes by ordinary users if they achieve ‘a commercial scale’ (art 2.14.1) which many amateur videos do on sites like Youtube. And it criminalizes legitimate websites by making them responsible for user behavior (‘aiding and abetting’ art 2.14.4).Worse, it permanently bypasses the democratic process by empowering the ‘ACTA Committee’ to ‘propose amendments to [ACTA]‘ without your approval. (art 6.4) In other words, it’s impossible to know what you’re voting for.The global movement against the US law SOPA showed that internet freedom is a crucial issue which belongs in the legislative process of each country. You should view ACTA as an attempt by a handful of companies to circumvent the democratic process, and you should vote against it.Thank you. Please reply if you have any questions.

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Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

UPDATE: Email from a DF reader:

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

Tell them to “click the disk” and they look around for a CD icon. Tell them to “click the floppy disk” and they laugh at the word “floppy.” The machines have floppy disk drives, but the kids have never seen them used.

(via Daring Fireball)

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) is the trend of stretching our ‘attention bandwidth’ to cope with the myriad demands on our concentration posed by technology. The term was coined by the writer Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, who describes CPA as ‘the behavior of continuously monitoring as many inputs as possible, paying partial attention to each’. According to Stone, CPA is ‘post-multitasking behavior’. If multitasking is ‘motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient’, CPA is ‘motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network’. Anxious to connect and desperate not to miss an opportunity, CPA ‘contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation, and a sense of being unfulfilled’. Indeed, the ‘always on’ character of technology (emails, PDAs, IM, VOIP) compromises ‘normal’ social interactions (checking your BlackBerry or cell during lunch) and, in Stone’s analysis, ‘has created an artificial sense of constant crisis’. Like wild animals in a continuous state of alert, an ‘adrenalized fight or flight mechanism kicks in’. Of the hundreds of emails received each day, Stone asks, how many are ‘tigers’, requiring immediate action, and how many are merely ‘mice’? (Most, in fact, are likely to be spam.) Faced with this profusion of inputs we increasingly turn to filters (TiVo) and blocks (iPods) to find a signal amidst the noise.

Stone suggests that ‘the world may continue to be noisy, but our yearning and fulfillment are more likely to come from getting to the bottom of things, from stillness, and from opportunities for meaningful connection’.

From Schott’s Almanac 2007

To solve that problem, a great javascript bookmarklet by Arc90: Readability.

apple.com

By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case)  […]  But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear

ThisIsSand.com

The first collection is a series of audio-reactive ‘video sound sculptures’.  Inspired by synasthesia, the rare, sensory experience of seeing sound or tasting colours, these videos are physical manifestations of sound, sculpted by volume, pitch or structure of the soundtrack.

Check it out.

Gotta see it to believe it.  Watch the demonstration video here.

However, Snarkmarket points out the truly unbelievable savings that can be had by buying generic online.

For comparison’s sake, you get 32 pills in each bottle of Unisom (over-the-counter sleep-aid) and pay roughly $11.  Buy generic, however, and you’ll get 1,000 pills for $20.  I shit you not.