In a press release Tuesday, Viacom executives announced their newest hour-long VH1 Celebreality program, Knight Life, with former Brady Bunch star Christopher Knight, has been canceled for failing to reach the wretched depths of the network’s low standards.
The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model – paid content.
So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
The long-awaited Mozilla Firefox 3 for Mac and Windows, which emerged from beta at 10AM Pacific today, is the latest web browser to support the colour managed display of photos with embedded ICC profiles. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s turned off by default. Here’s how to turn it on.
And then there were three (at least!). After much anticipation, Matthew Drayton has shipped Iris 1.0, his company Nolobe’s entry into the “Photoshop-like” pixel-pushing market on OS X.
Nader Abdul Kadoos, a 50-year-old returning student, was set upon by one such street committee last month in the southern port city of Aden, in a confrontation that received broad attention in Yemen’s news media.
Kadoos’s apparent offense was to stroll out of the gates of Aden University after class in a group of male and female students.
About five bearded men pounced on the students, grabbing one woman by the hand to hold her while two other female students escaped in taxis, Kadoos recounted. The men slapped some of the male students. “Is this a lover’s lane?” the leader of the gang shouted, according to Kadoos.
More bearded men appeared from nowhere to upbraid the group, while some outraged passersby stopped to defend the mostly young men and women.
“Do you want us to wait until they start having sex in the street?” Kadoos recalled one of the bearded men shouting back at the crowd.
In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”).
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”
“An absolutely disgusting photo,” said Darlene Tye, a transplant from California who is especially sensitive to how Southerners are depicted in the media. The missing teeth and what she described as unkempt attire reinforced a stereotype about people from the South, she said.
Valerie Cox objected to the photo for other reasons. After attending the concert with friends, she went to Jacksonville.com and was disappointed to find only five photos, and nothing like she expected.
“I was shocked to see the main photo representing the festivities was of an older African-American man who was missing most of his teeth,” she said. “There were thousands of other people in attendance who better represented the crowd. As an African-American, myself, I feel insulted,” Cox said.
In Access to Life, eight Magnum photographers portray people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Paolo Pellegrin in Mali, Alex Majoli in Russia, Larry Towell in Swaziland and South Africa, Jim Goldberg in India, Gilles Peress in Rwanda, Jonas Bendiksen in Haiti, Steve McCurry in Vietnam and Eli Reed in Peru
During the show, the group went on a rampage using spray paint as artillery, bombing the school with their cryptic-like tags, even spraying officials in the face who tried to stop them. It was chaos and now, after the event, school administrators are thinking about pulling Rafael Augustaitiz’s financial scholarship.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen or heard of a student photo contest that has a prize list like this.
Thanks to our newest sponsor, Adorama Camera, the SportsShooter.com Student Portfolio of the Year contest has a suite of impressive prizes. We are calling this list “The Essentials,” and it contains all the tools to have when you’re starting to get serious about photography.
As the Grand Prize awarded to the 2008 Student Photographer of the Year, one talented student member of SportsShooter.com will win the whole list.
And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.
But over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. But they do show the kinds of problems that can emerge.
The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.’s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world’s wealthy.
Long-time viewers of this site will likely be familiar with San Francisco-based reader Jason Lee’s long-term project photographing his two daughters, Kristin and Kayla.
Bert Hardy was the star troubleshooting photojournalist on Picture Post, Britain’s most influential picture magazine. But a story he shot in 1950 during the Korean war seemingly precipitated its decline and fall. On the eightieth anniversary of the launch of the mass-market weekly Graham Harrison turns back the pages of photographic history and looks forward to a reassessment of Hardy’s career.