Culture and Society

This does not strike me as a great idea: you’re sitting on a porta-potty at a summer concert, the same one visited by dozens of your fellow revelers before you. I do not linger when forced to use a porta-potty, if for no other reason than I am breathing out …

I guess he, um, won: That registration was part of a formal police caution Townshend received for accessing a Web site containing images of child abuse. Townshend was arrested in January on suspicion of making and possessing indecent images of children. The arrest was part of Operation Ore, an FBI-led …

If you’re like I am, you often feel that life is passing by in a blur, rushing from the past to the future, rarely stopping for the present. One of the great things about blogging is that it slows, or at least documents, this rush. Here is a project taking …

CNN interview with one of the four college students sued by the RIAA for contributory copyright infringement: BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: A story we talked about yesterday want to pick up again today. The recording industry opening up a new front in its fight against file sharing over the Internet. …

The Business Software Alliance has a new site, Play It Cyber Safe, and a new mascot, a grinning ferret, in its campaign to teach kids as young as 8 years old “safe and responsible” computing practices, like avoiding the rampant software piracy that member companies like Microsoft and Adobe blame …

Via, Glenn Reynolds, Sonic Foundry, maker of our beloved Acid music creation and Vegas video editing software, has been swallowed up by Sony: Sony Pictures Digital and Sonic Foundry®, Inc. announced today Sony Pictures Digital has struck an agreement to purchase all of Sonic Foundry’s desktop software products and related …

Fast-Talk Communications has created software to locate subject matter in an actual audio file by phonetically spelling and entering any term. Technology Review reports: Say, for example, that you want to locate the word “Sudetenland” in an audio account of events leading up to World War II. According to Mark …

Indian software sector slows down: Gone are the days when Bangalore’s army of software engineers scrambled to meet demand from U.S.-based clients and could confidently charge a premium for their services. The game has shifted to volumes, discounts and more spending to boost sales as software services risk becoming just …

Press release from Apple: Apple today announced that its revolutionary iTunes® Music Store sold over one million songs during its first week. Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, dispelling concerns that selling music on a per-track basis will destroy album sales. In addition, over half of the …

Music, sports, news and entertainment audio and video to mobile phones and handheld computers from Real starting today: Seattle, Washington-based RealNetworks, which makes software used to send and receive audio-visual content over the Web, said that devices such as Nokia’s 3650 camera-phone and Palm Inc.’s Tungsten T and Zire 71 …