Anti-SOPA Moves Mainstream
Now that Jimmy Wales' announcement of Wikipedia's participation in the Internet Blackout is out, mainstream netizens will unhear and unsee the various issues surrounding SOPA. Most people have distanced themselves from the pending bill in the US House. Some are unable to connect themselves to the issues. That's not going to stay for very long.
Wikipedia joins Reddit in going dark on January 18th in protest to the proposed law that carries a provision of DNS blacklisting for sites reported to have infringed on copyrights. This will bring the issues home to teachers and students, all wikipedia users ( and I wonder who hasn't visited the site in his internet lifetime).
Zodiac Signs Used to be Ice Breakers
In social conversations. Well the Chatham-Kent Police Service decided to list their criminals according to their zodiac signs.
My Notes on Privacy
Among the social web services, Facebook, Google plus and Twitter, only Twitter allows userspace unbridled anonimity. People can use aliases, create avatars at will and earn followers by the sheer power of what they are putting out, the content.
Google plus seeks out and delete unreal profiles, in fact, some celebrities have to prove their identities before their accounts are allowed. There are no protection when people use their real names.
Facebook is a queer service among the three. It rides the fences unsure of itself. Most Gurus of the internet agree that real names policy wont protect you and others and it defeats the purpose and essence of the web, even the social web.
Only when individuals have the protection of anonimity are they empowered. Sometimes they do naughty things, sometimes stupid things. But who knows they might just slay dragons someday.
Praying Mantis Meets Sopa
"my antenae? they do that whenever predators are close."
Correction To A Meme
Kim Jong-Il died yesterday.
His father's name is Kim Il-Sung.
But I know sooner or later their reign will end because the people of North Korea deserves better.
Peace.
Cartoon: Rob Cottingham at Read Write Web
The U.S. Congress is trying to fix your internet like we fix naughty dogs. Also I'm sure that those 50 somethings know what they're doing when it comes to the internet.
Clementine It Is
I'm staying with Clementine after trying several other alternative in the media player application category. I tried Rhythmbox and Banshee simultaneously at one time. Rhythmbox feels so under featured right now that I'd rather use CMUS. In fact I have used CMUS at one one-week period of this try-out. I enjoy playing this command line controlled media player without fuss and with minimal resources for hours on end.
Banshee is the one time Ubuntu favorite media application. I always find something to be annoyed when using Banshee. Failing to start, Dbus problems, extension failures/incompatibility. I can't get internet radio to work or fetch stations (Rhythmbox trumps Banshee in this category). Banshee's feature set is exactly what I want out of a desktop media player. So the search continues.
Clementine is based on Amarok-1.4 and it uses Qt. (Banshee uses mono and Rhythmbox uses Gtk). Most of the features I like in Banshee has an equivalent on Clementine. But the execution, that's the difference. Fetching album art is an example. Banshee do it pretty much under the covers. No option for the user to intervene in case of failure or wrong album cover art. And what if I just want a different album cover?
Clementine's solution is a Cover Art manager with image search and the user gets to choose.
