This was a fight on a platform we’re not at this point comfortable with, and we were going up against an opponent that controls that platform.
— Michael O’Leary of the MPAA talking about the Internetz.
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In more silly escalator pictures…
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The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention.
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Rent seeking is not a behavior innovators have the time or energy to engage in.
From Y Combinator’s latest request for start ups.
(Source: ycombinator.com)
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Wood-burning sauna and Snorkel tub in Naramata, BC, Canada. It’s surrounded by a five acre organic orchard of cherries, apples, pears and apricots called Picker Shack.
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CBS News hires sportswriters to cover politics. Or something.
Since 1980, the winner of South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary has gone on to win the GOP nomination.
Let’s see, 1980… so that’s 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008… one, two, three, four… wait, I lost count - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… that can’t be right. Yes, yes, it is.
So what CBS is really saying is that in a statistically insignificant sample set, a longitudinal data set - the tail end of a longitudinal sample set - in which they ignore all other variables, one of the variables is a really, really good predictor.
Not fundraising or cash on hand (which might, themselves, predict historical SC victories, no?), the culmination of previous wins, height, age, astrological sign - any one of which might be correlated with winning the nomination. And what happened in 1976? 1972? Why don’t those years matter?
This is about as analytically significant as the sportscasters who tell us that, “The Bears have never beaten an AFC on the road under a full moon when the home team plays Justin Bieber over the PA”.
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Suddenly the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities.
Clay Shirky on PIPA and SOPA. As he notes, these bills follow Patrick Leahy’s previous endeavor on behalf of the MPAA, a bill named COICA. If PIPA and SOPA are killed, they will, like horrific zombies from a recycled Hollywood plot line, rise again.
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I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being ‘lost’ in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
— Richard Feynman
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The effort has covered ground so quickly in part because of the Corps’s relentless, non-ideological pragmatism. They have looked everywhere for good ideas, including the other armed services, development groups, and … Burning Man. In August, Marine Corps representatives traveled to the alternative arts festival to visit the Playagon, a camp where humanitarian-minded futurists and gear geeks, many ex-military, test disaster-relief technology in the austere conditions of the Nevada desert.
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While pols back home dither about energy policy, the Marine Corps, with the rest of the military not far behind, is charging ahead with renewable energy.
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Be more clever.
Love, Twitter
(Noted)
