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Tuesday, July 30, 2002 |
Joe Conason's Journal. Of course, compassionate conservatism saved the miners! Plus: "Bork in a dress" and the DLC is out to lunch. [Salon.com]
9:15:41 PM 
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Sour notes. The legal crackdown hasn't squelched MP3 trading -- it's just made it more of a pain. But the music industry would still rather fight than give its online customers what they want. [Salon.com]
9:14:30 PM
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Another casualty to the new arms race: SUVs in America. A good friend of mine was recently involved in a fairly nasty accident while driving along a highway in her Honda Accord. She was struck from behind by an SUV, spinning her out of control, leaving her car lying horizontal in traffic. She was hit again by a pickup truck, throwing her car into the median. Moments later, a small convertible hit the pickup as it careened out of control across the road. She escaped serious injury, as luckily did everyone else involved in the accident. But something changed in my friend that day, she was afraid to get back behind the wheel of a car and go back onto the road. Afraid, until she joined the new "Arms Race": SUVs in America. [kuro5hin.org]
9:13:56 PM
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Security warning draws DMCA threat. Hewlett-Packard targets researchers for discussing a software vulnerability in what appears to be the first attempt to expand controversial copy protection law to security flaws. [CNET News.com]
9:11:48 PM
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Joe Conason's Journal. Kerry outshines Lieberman at a Manhattan "New Democrat" beauty pageant. Plus: Can this White House only dish it out? [Salon.com]
9:09:25 PM
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Grime pays. Bush's cuts to the Superfund reward corporate polluters for stonewalling and leave neighbors of toxic sites frustrated and desperate. [Salon.com]
9:05:12 PM
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Music to no one's ears In tonight's Salon cover story, Farhad Manjoo surveys the sorry state of the online music world. Much of the file-trading world has been hobbled by the RIAA's legal assault, yet the music industry has not stepped forward with an alternative that makes sense.
In its prime, Audiogalaxy was beautiful, even better than Napster -- it allowed us to hunt for an obscurity even when the people who had the track weren't currently online, then download it once they reconnected. I used Audiogalaxy to fill out the odd corners of my library with live recordings and rarities; every artist whose work I downloaded and kept was one whose entire recorded commercial oeuvre I've already paid for in CD form.
My demographic profile may not be exactly what the record companies are after (I'm 43), but I've probably spent $1000 a year on music for the last decade or so; it's my biggest personal-entertainment expense by far. My music purchases soared during the heyday of Napster and Audiogalaxy, when I could easily sample new bands and new work; in recent months my purchases have tapered off. If the music industry wants to know where its sales have gone, there's one clue.
In the meantime, anyone who's looking for an online music service that offers variety and depth and doesn't try to control your behavior or limit how you can listen to the music you pay for, I recommend EMusic. For $10 a month you get unlimited access to their catalog. No, they don't have the major labels' hot hits. But they have enough interesting stuff to keep the alternative/indie fan happy for months -- like vast quantities of Guided by Voices, They Might Be Giants, Yo La Tengo and Pavement -- plus oldies, jazz and other eclectica.((Full disclosure: EMusic has worked with Salon on the music mixes we offer our Premium subscribers. I'm not involved with that -- and I gladly pay the company for its service.) [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
8:45:28 PM
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Fundamentally unsound. Left Behind, the bestselling series of paranoid, pro-Israel end-time thrillers, may sound kooky, but America's right-wing leaders really believe this stuff. [Salon.com]
8:35:32 PM
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Kafka in Tulia On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10 percent of Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with blacks. It is not an overstatement to describe the arrests in Tulia as an atrocity. The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in trouble with the law. [Daypop Top 40]
Is it at all surprising that this happened in Texas?
8:51:57 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Alderete.
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