More on the Intellectual Property Tip

MTV is reporting that Dr. Dre has been ordered to pay $1.5 million to the copyright holder (London-based Minder Music Ltd.) of a track he illegally used in his latest album. According to Dre, he consulted a musicologist who said the riff was commonplace and then hired a musician to play the bassline for "Let's Get High". via Mediaburn

The Madonna Remix Project

"You'd think Madonna would have learnt by now: it never pays to annoy the fans, especially on the internet. An attempt by the singer and her record company to embarrass people downloading illegal free copies of her album – by replacing them with a brief message from Madonna, saying "What the f*** do you think you're doing?" – has instead sparked a remix bonanza, with online DJs creating dozens of brand new tracks using her words as a sample."

rent-a-negro

"Supporting multiculturalism is an important part of building social clout. These days, it's on everyone's agenda. But how to start? Where do you find the people to diversify your life? What if you don't know any black people? You want to appear up to date, but just don't have the human resources. One public lunch with rent-a-negro and you'll be on your way to being seen as the most cutting edge member of your circle."

Yahoo! News - Rob Zombie Erecting 'House' Sequel

Oh, hell yeah. If you haven't seen House of 1000 Corpses yet, you NEED to see it. It kicks much ass.

"The sequel is slated for a fall start with an April 2004 release to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the original.
'I am dying to get back behind the camera to deliver a sequel which will blow away the original,' said Zombie."

Blogshares: Fantasy Blog Shares Market

This is kind of neat. You sign up, and start out with $500 fictional dollars for investing. Then,

There are several ways of finding shares to invest your money in. Start by looking up some of the blogs you like to read. Use the searchbox at the top right of the screen, type in the URL or the name of the blog and see if it's already listed on BlogShares.

Another way is looking through the Hot Stock list or using the Major Indexes. The links are on the left side of the screen.

You can also have a look at the Top 100 Players list and look into the profiles of the players. Perhaps the stock of their blogs is worth buying?

via Lost Remote Blog

Article on the Upcoming Matrix Reloaded Film

I'm very excited about the Matrix movies being released, not only because I think they will kick much ass, but because our culture is going to be submerged in the ideology of The Matrix. It's, all in all, going to make for an interesting time in American experience. Blake's "mind-forged manacles" may take on an additional context in the next few months! An Excerpt:

"There's a profound unhappiness at work, a feeling that there's something wrong with the world, something amiss," Davis adds. "And people can easily begin to believe that what we know is actually an illusion, and that there may be some other, better world outside of it. Once you start asking what is and isn't real, you start to connect up with much older ideas, whether it's Gnosticism or the Hindu idea that everything is maya [the illusion of the reality of sensory experience], and that, in turn, becomes good fodder for films like 'Blade Runner' [1982], 'The Truman Show' [1998] and 'Dark City' [1998]."

Snoop Doggy Blog

Exactly what it says. Snoop's blog. via boing boing

Understanding the Accelerating Rate of Change

"We're entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today's rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace."
(via Follow Me Here)

Scientific American Article: Synesthesia

"An understanding of the neurobiological factors at work requires some familiarity with how the brain processes visual information [see illustration on opposite page]. After light reflected from a scene hits the cones (color receptors) in the eye, neural signals from the retina travel to area 17, in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. There the image is processed further within local clusters, or blobs, into such simple attributes as color, motion, form and depth. Afterward, information about these separate features is sent forward and distributed to several far-flung regions in the temporal and parietal lobes. In the case of color, the information goes to area V4 in the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. From there it travels to areas that lie farther up in the hierarchy of color centers, including a region near a patch of cortex called the TPO (for the junction of the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes). These higher areas may be concerned with more sophisticated aspects of color processing. For example, leaves look as green at dusk as they do at midday, even though the mix of wavelengths reflected from the leaves is very different."

Another Great Interview From The Well

Rebecca Blood is an internationally known weblogger and writer. She has a BA in English and has held more kinds of jobs than you have, including waitress, nanny, actress, secretary, boat-builder's assistant, evil telemarketer, film production assistant, personal driver, film extra, caterer, web designer, author, speaker, administrative director for a non-profit, and "special forces" for a small regional magazine.

Rebecca has maintained the popular weblog, Rebecca's Pocket, since April 1999, linking and writing about current events, media literacy, web culture, sustainability, domestic life, and whatever else catches her eye. In September 2000 she published the influential essay "Weblogs: A History and Perspective" and in July 2002 she published her first book, "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog". Both have been used in university courses throughout the English-speaking world.

She is frequently called on by the press to illuminate the currently unstoppable weblog phenomenon, and has discussed online culture in interviews with the New York Times, Newsweek, Fast Company, the BBC, and on National Public Radio. She will be presenting a keynote at Blogtalk, the first conference about weblogs, to be held May 23-24, 2003 in Vienna, Austria. She lives in San Francisco.

Interview by Weblogsky

O'Reilly First to Adopt Founders' Copyright: Publisher Restores Balance to Copyright with New Legal Option from Creative Commons

"Technology publisher O'Reilly & Associates has launched the latest of its initiatives to shake up the intellectual property establishment. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly announced his company's commitment to applying the Founders' Copyright to O'Reilly books.

Developed by Creative Commons, the Founders' Copyright is a legal option that allows copyright holders to voluntarily release their works to the public after the period envisioned in the original 1790 US copyright law--14 years, with the option of one 14-year extension. O'Reilly will be releasing its books under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits others to copy and distribute work as long as they give the original author and publisher credit."