Thursday, March 22, 2012
The True Story of the Internet - How it's all started.
Download: The True Story of the Internet is about a revolution — the technological, cultural, commercial and social revolution that has radically changed our lives. And for the first time on television, we hear how it happened from the men and women who made it possible.
From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way.
The style of the story-telling is up close and personal. With first-hand testimony from the people that matter, we tell a story that has all the excitement of a thriller — full of battles and back-stabbing, moments of genius and moments of sheer hilarity. You will never surf the net in the same way again.
Download is hosted by technology journalist John Heileman. He’s an edgy, combative, hi-energy New Yorker who never takes anything at face value. He’s also a personal friend of most of Silicon Valley’s most important characters and he revels in craziness of it all. After all, this is a story in which 20-year-olds become overnight billionaires, create, destroy and re-create more wealth in ten years then human race has ever seen, and still struggle to get a date.
1. Browser Wars
This is the story of an epic battle between America’s mightiest corporation and a small group of “computer geeks” who created a revolutionary technology.
2. Search
In a few short years, a new and unique way of finding information revolutionized the Web. In the process, Google grew into one of the largest companies in the United States.
3. Bubble
The founders of Amazon and e-Bay, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar, tell the stories of how their businesses grew from nothing to dominate the global economy. These companies have changed the way Americans live.
4. People Power
The Internet has changed society and a new breed of entrepreneurs is shaping the digital future. Find out how it all started with Napster, a way of swapping music dreamt up by the teenaged Shawn Fanning.”
Occupy Wall Street documentary I made during the weekend I spent at Zuccotti Park
The Occupation from Bert McKinley on Vimeo.
In early October 2011 I went down to New York City to spend a long weekend at Zuccotti park - Campsite for Occupy Wall Street. This is what I saw and some of people I talked to in my 3 days spent at Occupy.
How The Internet Is Creating New Possibilities For Artists Online
How The Internet Is Creating New Possibilities For Artists Online
The short video opens up with Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, talking about the platform’s success in funding creative works. The platform revolutionized arts funding by empowering artists to take fundraising into their own hands, at a very low risk for artists, and simultaneously opened the door for new patrons of the arts. Did you know that Kickstarter is almost set to out-fund the United States’ National Endowment for the Arts?! That’s a big deal.
Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of Creative Commons, speaks about how his company is liberating and protecting artists and their works through their series of customizable licenses. CC licenses let artists choose the level of control they want to place on their works, enabling the creatives to choose how their work is or isn’t shared and attributed.
And last but not least, Ciel Hunter and Julia Kaganskiy, Creative Director and Global Editor of The Creators Project, respectively, talk about how we’re extending the lives of artistic experiences by bringing physical experiences online—as with Chris Milk’s Summer Into Dust installation during Arcade Fire’s Coachella set—and supporting digital artists like Rafaël Rozendaal, whose artworks exist primarily online. Then we bring both types of works to life in the real world during our global events.
Are you an artist that uses digital tools in innovative ways? Make sure to check out the Gallery and The Studio for opportunities to be featured on The Creators Project blog and at our events.
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200 police and not even one EMT. That shreds the mythical public safety line the city uses to crack down on the OWS protesters
by theodorAdorno
It is difficult to crystallize the totality of what this means. The City, if nothing else, is concerned with ass-covering. No agency is immune. It runs from the top official down to the cop on the beat. You have a family to support, lawyers are stalking, so you always cover your ass.
Until now.
So complete is the tunnel vision of the city to squash any vector which may pose a threat to property value, that for one brief, blissful municipal-blink-of-an-eye, numerous agencies have apparently decided life is too short to spend it on ass-covering.
Carpe diem, but keep your eye on the prize.
If you can station 200 police at a park ahead of a rally for public safety reasons, you can put one ambulance there. If it's a big enough deal to blow all that money on riot police overtime, it's a big enough deal to have a medical professional nearby.
Too much?
Ok. Just one EMT with a field kit.
Still too much?
How about Just clearing even a single certified (or un-certified) medical professional to cross police lines in the event of an emergency with one individual.
Still too much?
The city cares more about squashing protest than public safety, and it is probably not politically motivated. It could be some misguided attempt at protecting delicate ears of financial elites. It could just be about property value.
The Myth of Freedom in the Land of the Free - The US touts itself as the "Land of Free," but it has laws which are designed to crush criticisms of the state
| The myth of freedom in the land of the free |
The US touts itself as the land of free, but it has laws which are designed to crush criticisms of the state. |
 |
 Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the US has spent about $635bn to militarise the country's local police forces [GALLO/GETTY] | ||
New Haven, CT - In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers' wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US. It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon "met with the full force of the capitalist state". The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. President Grover Cleveland, over the objections of Illinois' governor, ordered federal troops to Chicago under the pretense of maintaining public safety. Soldiers fired their bayoneted rifles into the crowd of 5,000, killing 13 strike sympathisers. Seven hundred, including Debs, were arrested. Debs wasn't a socialist before the strike, but he was after. The event radicalised him. "In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle," Debs said later on, "the class struggle was revealed". I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall's Occupy Wall Street protests. As you know, the movement began in New York City and spread quickly, inspiring activists in the biggest cities and the smallest hamlets. Outraged by the broken promise of the US and inspired by democratic revolts of Egypt and Tunisia, they assembled to protest economic injustice and corrupt corporate power in Washington.
Before Occupy Wall Street, many protesters were middle- and upper-middle class college graduates who could safely assume the constitutional guarantee of their civil liberties. But afterward, not so much. Something like scales fell from their eyes, and when they arose anew, they had been baptised by the fire of political violence. Income inequality isn't just about justice; it's about freedom, too. One view of freedom minimises the state's role in an individual's life and maximises markets so that individuals are free to risk whatever they want to risk to be whatever they want to be. Another view sees the obligation of the state to hedge against the risk of the marketplace so that individuals can feel secure enough to be what they want to be. Obviously, the libertarian view favours someone who can afford risk; the socialist view favours someone who can't. One view has confidence in the market while the other is skeptical. One view sees income inequality as natural while the other sees it as politically oppressive. Emmanuel Saez, an economist from UC Berkeley, tried to quantify that oppression. He found that during the first year of the recovery from the 2008 crisis 93 per cent of incomes gains went to the 1 per cent. "Top 1 per cent incomes grew by 11.6 per cent, while bottom 99 per cent incomes grew only by 0.2 per cent," he said in an update of a previous study. "... Such an uneven recovery can help explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality." Moreover, income for the 99 per cent grew by 20 per cent from 1993-2000, but during the Bush years, it grew by only 6.8 per cent. It's worth saying again that this is not a natural occurrence of the free and open marketplace. The upward redistribution of wealth is the concrete result of politics and policy - one might even say socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else. Or should I say authoritarianism for everyone else. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the US has spent about $635bn to militarise the country's local police forces. It's ostensibly an effort to better prepare communities in case of another attack. But, as Stephan Salisbury reportedrecently, there has been a cultural transformation, too. "The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilised and militarised right down to the university campus." When the state makes a fetish of security, as the US has, it becomes hard to tell the difference between acts of civil disobedience and terrorism.
These collided in an instant in November. New York City cops, under the orders of a billionaire mayor to clear out Zuccotti Park, suppressed the rights of thousands of Americans who had been protesting the oligarchy's power over their lives. Later on, it was revealed that the real estate firm that owned the park had previously taken more than $174.5 million in tax-payer subsidies to rebuild after September 11. Not only was the state reacting to the threat of collective action; it was defrauding the public of its contractual right to use the park after having paid for it. Given all this, I sense the depth of Zinn's line about "the full-force of the capitalist state". Occupy protesters aren't just facing local police; they are facing an entire system bent on breaking dissent and protecting the status quo. And I sense this is why Eugene Debs became a radical after experiencing such political violence. How can you play by the rules when the 1 per cent writes, and keeps rewriting, the rules? The only way to fight back is to fight back against the entire system. In 1918, Debs visited three socialists in jail for dodging the World War I draft. Afterward, he walked across the street to give an impromptu speech that enraptured onlookers for hours. Because of this speech, Debs was eventually found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, a deeply un-American set of laws that are still in effect (in fact, the Obama administration is using the laws against Bradley Manning, who leaked secrets to WikiLeaks). These laws are designed to crush criticism of the state. The irony of Debs' time may be the irony of ours: "They tell us we live in this great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people," Debs said to his audience. "That is too much, even for a joke." John Stoehr is the editor of the New Haven Advocate and a lecturer at Yale. Source |
Honest question, what has Obama done since he's been in office?
by seeellayewhy
I live in an area where I'm constantly hearing people put down Obama for "not doing anything" "being a muslim socialist" and all sorts of other horrible lies. I'm not pro-Obama (not really favorable to either side), but I want to know what types of things I can shove back in these peoples faces when they say things like this.
This...
http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/
I live in an area where I'm constantly hearing people put down Obama for "not doing anything" "being a muslim socialist" and all sorts of other horrible lies. I'm not pro-Obama (not really favorable to either side), but I want to know what types of things I can shove back in these peoples faces when they say things like this.
This...
http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/
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