...too soon?

Earthquake Sets Japan Back To 2147 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

TOKYO—Japanese government officials confirmed Monday that the damage wrought on Japan's national infrastructure by the July 16th earthquake—particularly on the country's protective force field, quantum teleportation system, zero-point fusion energy broadcasting grid, and psychodynamic communications network—was severe enough to set the technologically advanced island nation back approximately 300 years to a primitive mid-22nd-century state of existence. (xposted to nihon)

"Riding with Gunhed"

William Gibson writes:

When I wrote Virtual Light, I had many giggles making things like this up.
Cops In Trouble indeed.

Consider this a follow-up post to my danger_army post about specialized professional psychological screening and post-action care for civilian contractors in hot zones.

stronger

KANYE WEST | STRONGER: my post-lunch-time present to you.

Edit: And iTunes' present to me is to tell me to stick my credit in my ass, because -though it is displayed as the number two music video on the iTunes site- trying to access the page for the video or trying to purchase it through a search result link within iTMS returns a "this item is no longer available in the US store" error. I am hoping iTMS hasn't started IP address range blocking for foreign purchase sales, as Xbox Live Marketplace and Pandora.com have begun. I will be very, very cross.

Gibson on the google-effect on culture: "Everything is hyperlinked now."

Amazon.com Bookstore's Blog: interview with William Gibson on his upcoming Spook Country

Amazon.com: Did you feel obligated to change it?

Gibson: In some cases. The Vancouver stuff is less one-on-one than the Manhattan stuff, for instance. The places, the restaurants are in different neighborhoods, things like that. The New York stuff I somehow stuck closer to the real thing. The New York stuff is more googleable.

Amazon.com: Yeah, everybody knows New York, every inch of it.

Gibson: You can google it at a higher resolution.

prince is my hero again

Prince Points the Way to a Brighter Future for Music:

Paul Quirk, co-chairman of Britain's Entertainment Retailers Association, threatened: "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores."
(...)
Prince's latest gambit also succeeded by acknowledging that copies, not songs, are just about worthless in the digital age. The longer an album is on sale, the more likely it is that people can find somewhere to make a copy from a friend's CD or a stranger's shared-files folder. When copies approach worthlessness, only the original has value, and that's what Prince sold to the Mail on Sunday: the right to be Patient Zero in the copying game.

My problem with the RIAA and the MPAA (the "MAFIAA" there in tags) is that they look at consumers as potential criminals, much in the same way that a police officer looks a citizen; only without reason, and certainly without vested authority to do it. Which is why it gets under my skin so much when the MAFIAA starts looking for ways to enforce "its own brand of justice," by hiring off duty cops impersonating on-duty behavior to roust street dealers of CDs and DVDs, or by demanding that they be allowed pretexting in order to entrap people.