Amazon.com Widgets
zgf architects via seattle times
liem bahneman, via komo-tv
designboom.com
buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery
irwin allen's 'the time tunnel' (1966), via scaryfilm.blogspot.com
…building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe? And when they’re done, what will happen to them?
j.r. simplot co./idaho dept. of environmental quality, via kplu
escapistmagazine.com
foodbeast.com
via 'what makes the pie shops tick' at flickr.com
anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas
Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:
(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.
(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.
Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.
After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.
Elsewhere in randomland:
david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com
And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!
It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.
gjenvick-gjonvik archives
Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.
The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.
Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.
This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.
In other randomosity:
Seventy degrees on Easter. It felt like the whole outdoors had come back to life.
casey mcnerthney, seattlepi.com
…In the long term today’s affordable housing comes from yesterday’s luxury flats, and cutting off the supply of the latter will deny our children the former in the absence of massive, unsustainable public subsidy.