b1ff.org: !=

Just 100% Jakob Nielsenism.

Rasmus Fleischer writes: “‘The Pirate Bay’ must be defined as an assemblage.” He prexplains:
We are used to imagine The Pirate Bay as a legendary entity fighting an epic battle, on behalf of the millions of file-sharers. However, it is not exactly a legendary entity that is being sold. It is something different. So what is [...]

After his TED talk, Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School is all the rage. He published these warning stickers in early 2007:

Original PDFs here.
See also: “1991,” “Pretty much.”

Building under construction in Shanghai collapses:

Copyrights & Campaigns finds this curiosity in “the record label plaintiffs’ written discovery regarding Joel Tenenbaum’s fair use defense,” addressed to Berkman-founder Charlie Nesson:
Admit that the image attached hereto as Exhibit 1, with the caption, ‘Destroy Capitalism, Support Piracy,’ is a true and correct copy of an image that was posted to the Internet by [...]

City of Bozeman, Montana, consent and release to conduct criminal background and reference checks:
Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or
forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.
Website/Domain    Username/Member    Log-In    Password
_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

(risks)

Mark Tansey:

Spiegel:

“Painters compete during a facsimile match in Dafen Village. More than 110 contestants make facsimile of portrait or scenery oil painting in the timed match.”
See also: “Ways of seeing.”
(Dafen image: glevin)

El Reg:
New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid [...]. The so-called smart meters for the first time provide two-way communications between electricity users and the power plants that serve them. Prodded by billions of dollars from President Obama’s [...]

http://www.schneier.com/down.html:

McMansion made for Venice Biennale sinks:

BoobTube video here (embedded video verboten by AFP).
(mw|bldgblog)

So if it doesn’t work out, do we also get a “twitter clampdown,” a “twitter bloodbath,” the “twitter terror” or the “twitter archipelago”? http://bit.ly/rtthis

Unsigned front-page NYT article, “Times Reporter Escapes Taliban After 7 Months” (20 Jun ’09)
“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages,” said Bill Keller, [...]

National Pork Producers Council:
[S]ince 1948, manure generated by U.S. meat-producing animals has been reduced 25 percent while production of meat has increased 700 percent.
The US population increased roughly 110% in the same period.

Someone — it really doesn’t matter who:

Pretty much sums it up.

From davidhorvitz.tumblr.com (9 Feb ’09):

(booooooom)

Six Flags ‘goes tits up,’ as the Brits say. One way to tell the story of how that story unfolded could involve the rigid application of Tufte’s parsimonious hectoring, sermonizing, and hucksterizing; but something like speculativebubble.com’s dramatization could be so much better.

Meanwhile… Twitter-coupon blue-light special flash-mob permanent-floating-bailout-club just-add-water MMFery.
In a press release issued this morning, [...]

“The Present General Tommy Franks Leadership Institute and Museum,” 507 S Main St, Hobart, OK, according to tommyfranksmuseum.org:

“The General Tommy Franks Leadership Institute and Museum,” 507 S Main St, Hobart, OK, according to maps.google.com:

(abu muqawama)

California State Controller John Chiang in a 10 June ’09 letter to Schwarzenegger:
In the absence of legislative action, the State will not have sufficient cash to meet all of its payment obligations on July 28. By July 31, the cash deficit will increase to a negative $2.78 billion.
(calcrisk)

Interactive display of the Cu Chi tunnel complex, from oobject.com:

From Wikipedia:

A good book on the subject: Mangold and Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (Berkley, ’86), notable for aerial photos of graffiti carved into jungle terrain.
(kottke)

NYT discovers the “famed” yet previously unmentioned remunerations networks of the wealthy that have subsidized NYC’s “innovation” for a decade and a half:
Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical [...]

NYT (Labaton, “Millions Face Blank Screens in TV Switch,” 5 Jun ’09) quotes another Obamatron suggesting that Shrub’s administration had other priorities than, say, doing what government is supposed to do:
Michael J. Copps, the acting head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that the people most likely to lose reception are society’s most vulnerable — [...]

State-corporatist innovative process revealed: industry lobbyists bitching that the groupthinktank’s independent report they paid for includes independent opinions. In the linked article, Michael Geist, who first spotted the plagiarized passages, uses an excellent phrase:
It’s equally telling, if not more important, on the copyright side. It’s a very clear confirmation that the kind of policy laundering [...]

A klein bottle:

“From the archives: how to fix a liquidity crisis (13 Dec ‘07)”—that is, in 2007—quoted the FT as saying:
The latest Fed flow of funds data shows that FHLBs [Federal Home Loan Banks, "a little-known network of government-sponsored bank co-operatives founded during the Great Depression"] issued new loans at an unprecedented annualised rate of [...]

American Chronicle, 20 May ’09:
U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar praised the cooperation between the United States and Kazakhstan that has led to the removal of more than 160 pounds of bomb-grade nuclear material from Kazakhstan through the National Nuclear Security Administration´s Global Threat Reduction Initiative. [...] When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan emerged as the eighth [...]

Jeremy Scahill:
According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up [...]