Duncan Geere

colchrishadfield:

A gyre frozen into the ice, Newfoundland, Canada.

Mixing sustainability with pirate principles. Sounds good to me.

colchrishadfield:

Finger Lakes, New York. Glaciers clawed them into the earth as they retreated during the last Ice Age.

googlepoet:

www.googlepoetics.com

Culture shock for Amazon chief’s son who left rainforest for New York - BBC News

oneterabyteofkilobyteage:

original url http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/5153/

last modified 1997-04-23 11:25:51

‘Ja’ by Swod
Minimalist, glitchy and atmospheric:

I *love* the soft sound of the synths on this.

800 days of Minecraft development.

I think, and write, a lot about media on the web. Music, movies,  videogames, journalism and so on. And one thing I keep seeing over and over again is publishers of various types getting upset about freeloaders.

In music, movies and games, this usually means piracy. Everything that has ever needed to be said about piracy has been said, in most cases twice, so I won’t go into that. But what is interesting is seeing what happens in journalism. Most sensible news sites make their journalism available for free and pursue an ad-supported model instead. How does a person freeload on that?

The answer is with the use of ad-blockers. Niero Gonzales, the founder and publisher of gaming site Destructoid, has written an editorial about how approximately half of his readers block the ads on the site, usually using a browser plugin like Adblock. Those readers, he says, “hurt our writers”.

I think all of this hand-wringing about ad-blocking and piracy is missing something. *A certain amount of people will always be freeloaders on the web*, and if you don’t factor that into your business calculations, you’re doing it wrong. 

The beauty of the web is that the incremental costs of replicating media are essentially zero. Sure, bandwidth has a price, but only when your traffic changes by an order of magnitude. The cost of these freeloaders to you is negligible - and the amount you should think about them is similarly negligible. Instead, the only people in your mind when you’re making editorial decisions should be your paying audience. They’re the only people that matter.

The one exception is when the marketing department is thinking about expanding that paying audience. Those freeloaders are people who are already interested in what you have to say, so convincing them to part with some money for it should be easier than your average member of the public.

But how, when they’re already actively refusing to give us money in a way that costs them nothing? Well, probably because their refusal isn’t active at all. Far more likely is that they’ve been annoyed by ads on another site completely, downloaded an adblocker for that reason, and just haven’t disabled it.

So try another direction. Sell merchandise. Sell e-book editions of your best articles. Run a conference. Start a membership programme with perks for enthusiasts.

Do all of those things and DIVERSIFY. Because on the web in 2013, the more ways you skin a cat, the better.

It’s sunset in the high mountains of the Chilean Andes in 2030. High in the sky, a contrail marks out the flight of a drone, carrying a payload of tiny sensors, called smart dust. Each measures about a cubic millimetre, and is equipped with a pair of miniature wings made of a biodegradable polymer.

As they fall, they whir into life with the aid of a radioactive tritium particle contained within that gives them electrical power. The wings deflect the powerful winds, and the particles take on a grid formation, moving further and further apart as they descend. As they near the ground, birds mistake them for insects and dive after them. One or two are eaten, but the rest safely come to rest on the dirt of the high plateaus.

As the sun sinks below the horizon and dusk falls, the dust motes begin to collect data -  temperature, air pressure, humidity - which is beamed through their inbuilt mesh network to a base station, which in turn relays the data to a satellite.

There they will stay, silently monitoring, until their radioactive heart eventually gives out.

Let me share with you what happened to me this morning.

• I’d had the date of the SimCity release in my calendar for ages because I’m a huge fan of the series.
• I got up, had a shower, and then downloaded EA’s stupid own-brand download store Origin (for the second time) so I could buy the game because they won’t put it on Steam.
• It was all in Swedish, with no way to change the language option despite the “client language” being set to English GB.
• The prices were eye-bleeding. 550Kr for the regular version and 700Kr for the deluxe version.
• So I went to try and find it cheaper on Amazon. It’s £35 there, but I couldn’t tell if it came with a download code or if I’d be shipped a box.
• Then I asked on Twitter where the best place to get a download code for the Mac edition of SimCity was.
• The lovely @LewieP informed me that the Mac version won’t be out until “some time” after the PC version.  
• Rage
• Deleted Origin for the second time.
• Went to play Dota 2 instead.

myjetpack:

A book of my cartoons will be out in late April.

Tom Gauld is amazing.

andymalt:

Home on the Range - Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo

andymalt:

Pendulum Choir

Meanwhile, in the Danube delta…

As pointed out by Mike Masnick on Techdirt, there are three possible outcomes from TPB suing a Finnish anti-piracy group after they cloned their website (pasted):

• Finnish prosecutors do absolutely nothing, thus exposing their complete double standard in enforcing the law.
• A lawsuit happens, and TPB “loses” the case, as it’s an obvious parody situation which should be allowed — and thus, TPB reinforces the protections for parody.
• A lawsuit happens TPB actually wins the case, which most people would equally recognise as preposterous after seeing the initial press coverage of the story.