IT babbles

May
17th

Thu

Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?” - Julia Child

— Read more at Esquire.com (via jc100)

(via aaknopf)

Feb
9th

Thu

aaknopf:

I want to live in a world that prizes excellent and enduring long form writing. I buy books.

(via Beautiful/Decay | Artist Book Series Daily Art & Design Blog)

Jan
1st

Sun

Looking forward to NYC :)

(Source: zaynasty, via lugaresquenoquierocompartir)

Nov
10th

Thu

theatlanticvideo:

The Hidden Infrastructure of the Internet

The Internet is more than just a series of tubes, but how many people can actually describe the physical structure of the networks we use every day? Ben Mendelsohn explores this subject in Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, a short documentary created for his masters thesis as NYU’s New School. He takes us inside 60 Hudson Street in New York City, a nondescript building that houses one of the major nodes of the Internet on the east coast.

Oct
30th

Sun

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

— Joan Didion, in a 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside. (via fuckyeahjoandidion)

Apr
25th

Mon

Amazon Launches The Backstory; A Content Hub For Author Interviews And More

“Amazon is clearly trying to become more than just a destination to buy books. By providing features like Author video interviews Amazon is bringing high-quality content to its platform, alongside e-commerce. And via the ties with Facebook and the company’s blog, Amazon aims to create a community around its content.”

Apr
20th

Wed

[…] the most important fact is: they want your product! It’s up to you (as a content creator/provider) to ensure that consumers can buy your products in the simplest way, as quickly as possible, for a good (reasonable) price and without any fuss (no DRM, no unnecessary copyright notices and usable on a device of their own choice).”

Another common misconception is that every download is a missed sale. Most downloaders never even had the slightest urge to buy your product. So forget them, don’t even pay one second of your attention to them, but focus for the full 100% on the (potential) buyers that do want your product. That is the one and only good strategy.

— Fighting piracy is the dumbest thing you can do | FutureBook

Apr
4th

Mon

Instead of ginning up exceptions to a general prohibition on copying just to permit publicly valuable use of content, maybe we should just admit that “copying” no longer makes sense as a primary locus of intellectual property regulation. Fair use analysis typically employs a four factor test, but the upshot is usually to see how a particular type of copying would affect the market for the original work—which makes sense, given that the purpose of copyright is to give creators a financial incentive to produce and distribute new works. If that’s fundamentally what we care about, though, a default property-like right of control over copying, which now has to be riddled with exceptions to allow almost any ordinary use of content, looks like an increasingly circuitous Rube Goldberg mechanism for achieving that goal. I’m not sure what the alternative would be—or even whether rejiggering the basic categories would alter the the underlying analysis much. But—just off the top of my head—you could imagine a system where the core offense was not “copyright infringement” but some kind of tort of unfair competition with an original work. In many cases it would yield the same practical result, but at least we’d reorient the public discourse around “copyright” to focus on measurable harms to creators’ earnings—and ideally get away from the confused notion that copying without permission is somehow equivalent to “stealing” by default unless it fits some pre-established exception

— Julian Sánchez, Google Books, Fair Uses, and “Copyright” as Misnomer

[…] copyright law was really designed back in an age when making copies was expensive, and likely limited to those with commercial intent of some sort, as opposed to what we have today, where you make copies just to do almost anything on a computer.

— Focusing On The Copy Part Of Copyright Doesn’t Make Much Sense In Today’s World

Mar
29th

Tue

I happen to love the sensual experience of walking into a bookstore and examining the wares, picking up books, smelling them, admiring the covers, reading the first page or two. In 15 minutes, I can always find at least five books that really deeply interest me. I can’t do that online. It just doesn’t excite my viscera the way physical books do. This is a learned pleasure going back to when I was 10 and rode my bike downtown and walked into the reading rooms of the Minneapolis Public Library. It’s not a pleasure I can transfer to a digital image on a screen, just as I can’t get as excited about a picture of a naked woman as I do about one who is walking across the floor toward me.

— Garrison Keillor (via Doc Searls)