marginalia.org

Fabulous media ownership chart. (via AccordionGuy.) ©

A more accurate (if perhaps overly long) title for this oped by Michael Eisner would be "Abraham Lincoln would have wanted Disney to have eternal copyright, why don't you?" It's terrible in many ways; the most egregious being the complete absence of fair use from Eisner's worldview. And feel the chill in your spine at this:

The primary goal must be for the creators of content and the creators of computer technology to come together to agree on appropriate technologies to hinder the unauthorised duplication and transmission of copyrighted materials. The US government has an important role to play, by setting a reasonable deadline after which, if no progress has been made, it will step in to mandate technological standards to protect copyrighted works from unlawful exploitation.

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Highly recommended: Boards of Canada, a band from Scotland (of course); especially recommended if a is to b as b is to c as a song title amuses you just on principle. ©

A DVD release I'm really looking forward to: Waking Life. Bonus links:

• Wired article about the technology used to animate the film.
• Waking Life Artists
• A collection of animated documentary shorts using the same techniques. (I'm linking directly to the flash page, bypassing the broken detection scripts at the site entrance.)

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I love slate's Supreme Court Dispatches.

Justice Rehnquist cuts in to say that maybe there were only three instances of drug use because the drug-testing was such a great deterrent. Of course, that means that the program is fantastic either way: as a remedy had there been lots of evidence of drug use, a brilliant deterrent when there's none. Oh, bravo!

...

Of course, there is an argument to be made that parents who subject their good, achieving kids to unfounded, humiliating random urine tests are freaks. But that's not the court's position. The court thinks there's a drug problem in this country. True. And something needs to be done. Also true. And the court thinks it's not the fault of the government or the utter failure of its war on drugs. The failure, therefore, must be with those punks in the glee club. So, even if it's paternalistic and unfounded to deter (aka "control") good students with widespread terror and humiliation, they are, after all, merely "prisoners."

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Not only will Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi be released on DVD this year (News via camworld), Godfrey Reggio has a new film being released this year, Naqoyqatsi. ©

Best vehicle review ever written:

A "Road Sensing Suspension System" (RSSS) comes standard. Sure enough, it senses roads. But can it sense outdoor carpeting, corduroy, Florentine velour, or the decorative lava around Mrs. Zeile's marigolds? All we can report for sure is that the EXT is a dream on gravel. "Not bad for a solid rear axle," someone noted, though it wasn't me. You know you're on gravel only because of a tinkle-bing-da-da-bingle of rocks bouncing off the polished-steel exhaust tip, which is as big as a soup tureen. Otherwise, the EXT is a magic-carpet ride because it crushes its own gravel as it goes.

(via flutterby.) ©

The story behind google's logo changes. I know some people really hate them, but I think they're great. ©

Amazing story:

On a mid-September day in 1959, an inmate in the Mississippi State Penitentiary named James Carter led some of his fellow prisoners in singing "Po Lazarus," a bluesy, melancholy old work song about a man who is hunted and gunned down by a sheriff with a .44.

In the course of a long, hard life that followed, Mr. Carter, a sharecropper's son, forgot about that day, the song and the man who captured it on tape, Alan Lomax.

Until about two weeks ago, when two people visited him in his Chicago apartment to give him some amazing news — and a $20,000 check.

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Gosh - forgot to mention that the last post marks the beginning of year 3 for marginalia.org. Thanks for reading! ©