(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)

I’m at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company’s annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn’t make interesting.

At every intersection in the “village” there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid’s wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn’t go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.

Actually, I’m assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they’re seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they’re real, they’re a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou’ll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here’s a meta-gambling ploy I’m surprised the casinos haven’t hit on yet:

The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let’s say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don’t pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!

(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)

[Tags: whines las_vegas gambling casinos florence]

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Bruce Willis is set to make a fourth Die Hard movie, in which his character, John McCainMcClane comes out of retirement “to battle terrorists intent on using the internet to spread their attacks.” According to Entertainment iAfrica, the original script was titled Die Hard 4.0, but Willis nixed the pix’s title.

The previous Die Hards were titled: Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. So, what would be a good title for the fourth Die Hard given that it has the Internet as its villain? For example:

Die Hard on the Internets
Die Hard 404
Die Hard: Packet Wars
Die Hard: Vista

And what tough guy line might McClane utter in a signature sort of way? E.g.,

Something tells me the Net’s no longer neutral.
Time to live? Ten seconds, you son of a bitch.
I’m going to tear you a new open source.
Markets are conversations…and I speak fluent Bullet.
Cathedral? Bazaar? It all makes the same beautiful, beautiful rubble.

[Tags: movies contest bruce_willis]

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Captain Copyright looks like it’s a joke, but it’s not. The site, set up by the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, suggests lame activities for teachers eager to inculcate copyright totalitarianism in their young charges. It’s unintentionally hilarious. (And it’s been slashdotted.)

Seth Finkelstein, on a mailing list, points to this bit from the site’s own page on copyrights and permissions:

“Permission is expressly granted to any person who wishes to place a link in his or her own website to www.accesscopyright.ca or any of its pages with the following exception: in order to protect the moral rights associated with this site, permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright. Specifically, permission to link is explicitly withheld from sites featuring pornographic, racist or homophobic content. If you link to or otherwise include www.captaincopyright.ca on your website, please let us know.”

Ok, so how about this: Access Copyright is a fascist organization.

PS: My favorite bit from that page: “You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windowsâ„¢ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website.” That’s just plain weird. [Tags: coyright digital_rights access_copyright ]

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Ian Reardon is taking Craigslist RSS feeds and populating a GoogleMap of Boston with apartment listings.

Nice. [Tags: craigslist mashup google_maps web2.0 ian_reardon]

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The Boston Globe is a great paper, I love it, I subscribe, I read it everyday, ok? But the little things unreasonably annoy me. Aaarrrgggghhh! For example:

EVery Saturday, the Globe’s op-ed page runs a box of notable and fun quotes from the week, usually with a jest or two from the TV funnymen. This week, one of the seven quotes is Bill Clinton saying “I had a lot of happy times there,” talking about his private White House office in an audiotape tour of his museum. Ooooh, “happy times”…Bill Clinton….snicker snicker. This is as funny as Steven Carrell saying “That’s what she said” on The Office, except on the TV show it’s supposed to be embarrassingly not funny.

The funnyman quote is a Jay “The Opposite of Funny” Leno joke about the Capitol being locked down because of what sounded like gun shots. It turned out it was just a pneumatic tool being used to repair an elevator. Japed Jay, “You can see how these mistakes are made. See, people in Washington, they’re not used to the sound of actual work being done.”

Hey-oh!

This was the funniest political joke on TV last week? Congress is lazy? Clinton got blown? How trenchant!

Both of these quotes are lazy and thoughtless. They’re comforting, not revealing or provocative like the best political humor. In a small small way, they help abrade democratic discourse.

(Note to self: Next time have the morning coffee before blogging.)

[Tags: media whines boston_globe jay_leno humor]

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Scott Rosenberg berates the WSJ for mischaracterizing his own report on Al Gore’s talk at the D conference. Apparently Gore talked for five minutes about the history of the media, which was five minutes too much for the WSJ. Yup, we’ve got no time for history! Hey, f*cking up the planet is a fulltime job! [Tags: scott_rosenberg al_gore media history wsj]

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Jeez, the title of this post exhausts the body of this post. [Tags: susan_crawford network_neutrality]

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The Swedish Criminal Police yesterday shut down PiratesBay, a popular site where people posted torrents, many of which were copyrighted material. From this we can learn two lessons:

1. Even though PiratesBay hosted no content of its own, providing the metadata that lets people download illegal content apparently is as illegal as providing the data itself.

2. If there are doubts about the legality of your site, don’t include the word “pirate” in it. [Tags: torrents copyright piratesbay digital_rights]

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Microformats are quick-and-dirty standards for expressing common data types. The standard example is a microformat for reviews which lets a blogger encode the expected data — name of the reviewed thing, number of stars, commentary, etc. — in a standard way so another app can harvest it and, perhaps, aggregate all the reviews of restaurants in Watertown. Microformats are developed quickly, using what’s out there as a starting point, aiming at usable but probably incomplete standards, as opposed to setting up an industry committee to argue for 12 years about what Platonic ideal of the standard.

So, today Technorati [Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors and I’m friends with a bunch of Technoratians] announced that Technorati is going to provide searching that understands the data in microformats. For example, if you search for “chinese” within reviews, you get back reviews of Chinese restaurants but not blogs that talk about Chinese Checkers. (I assume that at some point Technorati’s microformats search — currently a research beta — will let us do fielded searches within microformat domains, e.g., have a box where we can enter dates when searching for events.)

Technorati also announced Pingerati, a service that aggregates and distributes microformat pings to anyone who wants them. So, if you have a calendar app that supports microformats, you can set it to ping Pingerati whenever you update it. Anyone who wants to build an app that uses updated calendar information can subscribe to it. (Unlike existing ping services, Pingerati is designed to work for pages that aren’t blogs as well as for blogs.) Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, says that Pingerati is free both to pingers and to those who want to receive the pings.

This is all good news because we need more metadata. Metadata lets us surf the information tsunami. Microformats are highly useful, but they won’t be adopted unless there are apps that make use of them. Today’s announcements make it easier for others to make something out of microformat data.

Hats off to Tantek Çelik for the enormous amount of work he’s put into this, and to Technorati for enabling Tantek to do this. [Tags: microformats standards metadata technorati tantek_celik pingorati search]

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I’m glad to see the Dixie Chicks’ new CD at #1, even though I liked their previous one better, because it bodes well for free speech: I think it’s wrong to boycott singers because of their political views but fine to girlcott them for those very same views. (Yes, I just made up “girlcott”: To buy from a vendor to reward her for her actions or beliefs. And, yes, I know “boycott” comes from Charles C. Boycott, so “girlcott” makes no sense at all.)

In March, 2003, I blogged that I was buying my first DC CD because it was being kept off the air because of an anti-Bush remark Natalie Maines made at a concert. Isn’t that as bad as boycotting the CD? Aren’t both actions a type of free speech?

Yes, both are free speech (in some extended sense of the term). You are totally within your rights to never buy another DC CD, to microwave your DC collection, to tell your local radio station you’ll change the channel permanently if it plays a song by any band with a D and a C in its name, and to say on talk radio that Maines is a traitor who ought to have her head shaved and be driven down the streets of Baghdad tied to the front of a Hummer. Whatever. There’s no question in my mind that all this is free speech.

Boycotting and girlcotting both exercise the right to free speech, but one is bad for that right and the other is not. Boycotting an artist because of views expressed outside of her work chills free speech. That seems to me to be the same as not shopping at your local convenience store because the owner said something at town meeting about, say, the local schools, with which you vehemently disagree. If half the town boycotted the store because of that, the owner would be driven out of business. This would discourage citizens from stating their views…an exercise of free speech that’s bad for free speech.

But suppose the owner were girlcotted because of something she said about the school system. This might have the effect of encouraging citizens to support popular causes in public. This would not be good for free speech since it provides an economic incentive to support what’s already popular. But, presumably the populace has less reason to girlcott for the expression of popular views than for unpopular views. Thus, girlcotting should tend to encourage a diversity of views. At the least it can mitigate the chilling effect of a boycott.

Sure, girlcotting could be gamed and manipulated. But, girlcotting — especially to mitigate the effects of a boycott — is overall good for free speech and good for democracy. I think. [Tags: dixie_chicks free_speech boycott girlcott music politics]

“Girlcott” has been used before, but to mean a protest by girls.

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