Culture and Society

What if P2P was 3-D? Dave Chappelle asks – Ron Jeremy, among others, answers.

Overall Internet traffic seems to be going up? This is why: Spending on high-speed Internet access services in the United States will reach an estimated $17.0 billion in 2004, up 30.5 percent over 2003, according to TIA’s 2004 Telecommunications Market Review and Forecast. By the end of 2007, spending is …

For some reason I find this funny as hell: dueling websites from lefty and righty punks, fighting for the souls of the punky masses: Pierced and tattooed rockers are in for a mosh-pit civics lesson this year. Nearly 200 bands are lining up to lambaste President Bush and try to …

John Borland reviews latest privacy schemes for P2P users on the Internet: most peer-to-peer systems require some degree of openness to work at all. In order to download a song from another computer online, a file swapper’s computer must make some kind of connection to it. That leaves a digital …

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers an opt-in plan for legal file sharing. This is a very helpful step down an inevitable path: The current battles surrounding peer-to-peer file sharing are a losing proposition for everyone. The record labels continue to face lackluster sales, while the tens of millions of American …

I am not a fan of the reject episodes of American Idol, being that they trade on cruelty, delusion, excrementitious talent, confrontation, and more cruelty. I think the reaction William Hung has received is due to his enthusiastic guilelessness in the face of rudely dismissive criticism from the AI judges, …

Our pals at the Specious Report are publishing a compendium of election satire links daily through the November Presidential election, “and inevitable re-count.” Here’s today’s list – click over for the links: Monday, February 23, 2004 252 Days until Tuesday, November 2, 2004 Republican Party to Endorse Ralph Nader as …

The price of making a “real movie” keeps coming down: Friends star Courtney Cox was not fazed when she saw the consumer video cameras on the set of award-winning psycho thriller November. ….And his indie film’s surprisingly low budget, just $150,000 instead of the $1-2 million low-budget movies usually cost, …

The most egregious aspect of the vile DMCA is the anti-circumvention provision that says you cannot abet copy-protection circumvention, even though the consumer has the right to make a fair use copy of a DVD. This catch-22 mentality has now been reaffirmed by a San Francisco federal judge: In a …

Very interesting column from Plain Dealer TV critic Michael Dawidziak today on the perils of 24-hour television news and the whirlwind news cycle: Perhaps Shakespeare, writing 400 years ago, somehow envisioned the era of 24-hour news channels when he coined that line about “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It could …