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)

I have a bad new habit. When I have to get the attention of someone wearing earphones in public, I treat them like furniture or dumb animals. I wave at them or grasp them firmly by the shoulders and move them out of my way as if they were inanimate objects. Sometimes they get lippy, but by then I’m just a memory; a memory convulsed by laughter.
—Mike Lisk’s twitter

Not sure if that semicolon was punctuationally appropriate, though.

We have the hottest first couple in the history of ever. http://flic.kr/p/7JDsym
—Mike Monteiro’s twitter

Check out the wordy disclaimers on flickr. Can’t blame ‘em, I guess.

(via Frangry)

Also happens to be one of the few, rare songs that are in my personal, particular, whistling octave (or what the fuck ever)—meaning I can whistle along and actually harmonize. Imagine that.

[him]
I’ll follow you into the park,
Through the jungle, through the dark,
Girl, I never loved one like you.

[her]
Moats and boats and waterfalls,
Alleyways and pay phone calls,
I’ve been everywhere with you.

[him]
We laugh until we think we’ll die,
Barefoot on a summer night,
Nothin’ new is sweeter than with you.

[her]
And in the streets you run a-free,
Like it’s only you and me,
Jeez, you’re something to see.

[both]
Ahh, home. Let me go home.
Home is wherever I’m with you.
Ahh, home. Let me go ho-oh-ome.
Home is wherever I’m with you.

The closest I’ve come to getting a handle on all this is something painter Eric Fischl has talked about. Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is an amazing experience. You say, “Come here, Fido,” and Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head in your lap, and wags his tail. You’ve had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly literal language. Now imagine saying, “Come here, Snowflake” to the cat. Snowflake might glance over, walk to a nearby table, rub it, lie down, and look at you. There’s nothing direct about this. Yet something gigantic and very much like art has happened. The cat has placed a third object between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to be able to grasp this nonlinear, indirect, holistic, circuitous communication. In short, art is a cat.

From “The Whole Ball of Wax” by Jerry Saltz.

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
“The intention of the organism is to survive.”
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

(via Claire)

Better get over there in a hurry… Woman who phoned in the complaint said he was painted up like an Indian… Said she never saw a kid do what he was doing: chewing the bark off a tree.

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