The US Military paid Dell $10.3 million for 600,000 copies of Acrobat Pro.
(Via Danger Room)
Twice:
For its re-release, the notoriously perfectionist Kevin Shields has remastered the album from the original tapes – but he also is also making available (as a second CD) a second version, a previous remastering from the original 1/2-inch analogue tapes, which he completed but never released.
Click through to stream, though you might want to wait for the highest quality available for this one.
From Pew comes perhaps the most revealing poll result I’ve ever seen:
(Via The Economist)
I half suspect ‘Amercia’ was just bait to rouse the elitist, Main Street-hating, liberal media and unify the ‘Real American’ base in defense.
But that’s wayyy too internet savvy for the Romney campaign.
…
Damn, fell for it.
That headline puts a lot of faith in venture capitalists. I’m filing this one away for later.
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.
This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.
” —The New York Times report on Obama’s drone war is a fantastic feat of journalism and a shocking, scary explanation of how war is now conducted.
The process described above is sickeningly similar to ad buying.
Flattr founder Peter Sunde on Apple decision to reject apps which use his company’s payment service.
Before you race to defend Flattr, remember: Sunde is one of the main men behind The Pirate Bay. It takes a special kind of asshole to profit from openly distributing the work of others without pay, create an alternative payment system for creators wherein he profits, and whine that he’s being shut out of a store which has always paid the content creators he’s ripped off.
(Via GigaOm)
There are some smart folks over at Circa:
The language change is minimal - from “content” to “information,” but the subtle shift alters how we think about a product and how users can engage with it.
Creating “content” implies a certain packaging. We are producing “video” content or “text” content. Even “multimedia” content denotes a packaging with a pretty bow for the consumers to appreciate. If information, as they say, wants to be free - then it can be packaged in unique ways that content cannot.
As I read it, Borthwick is suggesting that information has an inherent value. While content, as we traditionally think of it, is chock filled with information its value isn’t inherent but manufactured and mediated for the audience.
There will be much to discover at Circa but at the heart of it I believe Circa will value information over content.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Verge reports:
Arc90, the team behind Readability, is today introducing Readlists, a new website / web app that lets you create your own ebooks from your favorite articles online… The concept is simple: click “create Readlist,” paste in whichever URLs you’d like in your book, add a title and custom descriptions, and share.
You can export your book in either the near-universal ePub format, or send it directly to your Kindle. The option to send to iPhone/iPad does exactly the same thing as “Email e-book,” and seems to be there just to push Apple users in the right direction.
While I’ve been enjoying Instapaper’s similar feature for some time now, I worry about such an official, explicit, marketed product. It’s hard for the publishing industry, the people paying most of the writers whose pieces you include in your custom magazines, to view this as anything but a threat.
Watch: with a few editoral successes, sites will start attempting to lock down their content.
In one tenderness test, researchers cooked muscles to medium, punched out half-inch plugs of meat and set them in a machine that measures the force it takes to shear them in half. Promising cuts were given names like the Sierra, the Western Griller and the Petite Tender.
“If we can dig out a muscle and use it in a new way that hasn’t been done before, it seems to me we are obligated to give that muscle an identity so someone can understand what it is,” said Dr. Calkins, the Nebraska professor.
” —This will never end up on a How It’s Made.
