NewsTrust - Entertainment - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Technology should help us share, not constrain us

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Richard Stallman - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Companies like Amazon can control the way we use the ebooks we buy. Instead let's build a publishing model based on freedom I love the detective novel The Jehovah Contract , and I'd like everyone else to love it, too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let us do that. I couldn't do it with most commercial ebooks; it's not allowed. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict access, so it simply won't allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, for instance, you're not allowed to buy a book anonymously. Kindle books are typically available from Amazon only, and Amazon doesn't accept cash so users must identify themselves. Thus Amazon knows exactly which books each user has read. ...

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Obama and the Cult of College: Why Rick Santorum Had a Point

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:05:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - Mar. 07 - A week and a half ago, at a Tea Party rally in Troy, Michigan, the GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said this: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!" To rapturous applause, Santorum went on: "Ther

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Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 23 (Opinion) - Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich at the Republican Presidential Debate in Mesa, Arizona. Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status

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'The Vow' leads strong pre-Valentine's weekend at box office

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - Feb. 14 - 'The Vow,' starring Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, took in $41.7 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters from Friday through Sunday in the biggest domestic opening so far this year, according to studio estimates compiled by Reuters on Sunday. ...

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Shocker: Video of live woolly mammoth not entirely authentic (+video)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - Feb. 14 - Footage from a Russian filmmaker's personal history project was altered to create a widely discussed – and now thoroughly debunked – sighting of a woolly mammoth. ...

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Bosnian Serb Film Distributor Won't Screen New Jolie Film

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:44:00 -0800

Radio Free Europe - Feb. 13 - The sole film distributor in the Serb-run part of Bosnia-Herzegovina is refusing to screen a new movie written and directed by Angelina Jolie and set during the Bosnian war of the 1990s. Film distributor Vladimir Ljevak said he did not think Jolie's film

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KO Computer

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Daily Show - By Jon Stewart - Jan. 19 (Comedy News) - Wikipedia goes dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA, raising the question: do they expect us to go to the library like a common masturbator? ... If SOPA passes, people who stream copyrighted content could go to jail for five years.

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Jesse James: Return of the outlaw biker

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Susan Carpenter - Dec. 05 (Entertainment) - Jesse James had it all. The Hollywood A-list wife. A top-ranked cable-TV show. He'd built his Long Beach shop, West Coast Choppers, into an empire, wrenching custom $80,000-plus motorcycles for a celebrity clientele — an endeavor he spun off into a mass-market clothing line for Wal-Mart, a glossy gearhead magazine and an eco-friendly burger joint he hoped to franchise.

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Romney's Making the Right Play in Iowa

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By By NATE SILVER - Nov. 22 (Opinion) - Jeff Zeleny’s weekend story about how Mitt Romney’s campaign will exert more rather than less effort in Iowa deserves your attention. It reflects what is perhaps the most important strategic decision that any Republican candidate will make this year. Mr.

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Squirmy toddler? There’s an app for that

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:21:56 -0700

The Daily Record - By Associated Press - Oct. 26 - MIAMI — There’s a new routine these days whenever Amber Mullaney goes out to eat at a restaurant. While waiting to be seated, she asks her husband to get the phone ready to hand over to their 2-year-old daughter, Tatum. The phone — with its ability to stream episodes of Dora the Explorer — is a [...]

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End of the line for fancy Steuben crystal

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - Oct. 24 - In "Risky Business," a 1983 comedy drama starring Tom Cruise, a mother's prized Steuben (stew-'BEN) glass egg goes missing from the mantelpiece only to reappear - imperceptibly nicked - in the nick of time.

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Social Networking Among Young Arts Professionals

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:53:33 -0700

New York Times - Oct. 21 -

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President Obama Receiving Sycophantic Laughter

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Magazine - Jul. 08 (Comment) - While President Obama certainly has an above-average sense of humor for a politician — easy-going, self-effacing, maybe a little corny at times — he's not known as one of the planet's foremost comedians. Yet photographic evidence compiled by Daily Intel indicates that Obama may, in fact, be the funniest person alive. Either that, or people are just overdoing it in an effort to ingratiate themselves to the most powerful person in the world. Could be either one.

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What Hemingway Would Think of the Internet

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Marty Beckerman - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - If Ernest Hemingway hadn’t killed himself 50 years ago today at age 61, he probably would have died by now anyway. (No human liver could withstand more than a century of nonstop alcoholic pummeling. Not even Papa’s.) But Newsweek can fantasize about Princess Diana cheating death, so we can imagine Hemingway walking — or staggering — among us in 2011. What would the hard-drinking, adventure-loving writer think of our modern technological lifestyle? Not bloody much. We’re obsessed with conquering the digital world — accumulation of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn recommendations — whereas Hemingway conquered the physical world. The thrill of a retweet from Roger Ebert or Ashton Kutcher will never compare to the thrill of running with (more like from) the bulls or fighting a pack of voracious sharks over the remains of a prize-catch marlin.

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Violent video games, California and the ambiguity of freedom

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Keith Stuart - Jun. 28 (Opinion) - The US Supreme Court has ruled that an attempt by California to ban the sale of violent games to children was unconstitutional. We look at the factors involved and why this isn't a clear-cut victory for free speech.

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TV review: Keith Olbermann comes out swinging on Current's new ‘Countdown'

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Mary McNamara - Jun. 21 (Review) - "In the briefest of special comments ... this is a newscast of contextualization, it is to be presented with a viewpoint, that the weakest citizen of this country is more important than the strongest corporation, that the nation is losing its independence through the malfeasance of one political party and the timidity of another and that even though you and I should not have to be the last line of defense, apparently we are so we damn well better start being it."

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Decades Later, Beatles Hits Continue to Draw Fans

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Tim Riley - May. 13 (Interview) -

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Cannes kicks off with hommage to Bertolucci

Thu, 12 May 2011 11:48:00 -0700

Dawn - By Afp - May. 12 - Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci (L), is awarded with the Honorary Palme d'Or for his career from the president of the Cannes Film Festival Gilles Jacob (C) as President of the Jury Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun,

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Sony: 24.6M online gamers' data compromised

Tue, 03 May 2011 02:26:34 -0700

CBS News - May. 03 -

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Google can't be trusted with our books | Simon Barron

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:43:12 -0700

The Guardian - By Simon Barron - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians – they can't be held accountable to the publicGoogle announced last week that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. In this instance, the public managed to change Google's mind and stopped the mass deletion of a unique digital archive but the situation raises concerns about data under Google's control, including the unique archive of Google Books.The reason cited for Google Videos' closure is that the company would like to focus on its raison d'être, search, "[the] ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted". Shifting its priorities is its prerogative as a company: the issue is that on the basis of refocusing its business priorities, its first impulse was to delete the gigabytes of content given to it by users.This situation has disturbing implications for Google Videos' sister project, Google Books, and the approximately 15 million scanned documents in the archive. In partnership with some of the greatest research libraries in the world – the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Harvard University Library, the New York Public Library – Google Books has built up a huge digital library containing thousands of unique documents.Google Books has suffered problems in the past: practical problems – lawsuits from publishers and authors, criticism of its inconsistent metadata – and philosophical problems involving the theoretical concerns of allowing a private sector company to control shared cultural resources. These concerns have remained abstract but now, with the company's disregard towards videos, become more concrete.As a private sector company, the core aim of Google is to make money. The Google Videos situation shows that in order to lower expenditure and adjust its priorities, Google was willing to delete content entrusted to it by users. Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents: many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future. Google acted admirably by listening to users and working to save the videos but entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving and public cultural welfare is inherently dangerous: as the situation made clear, private sector bodies have the ability to destroy archives at a whim.Enabling access to digital information should be one of the key responsibilities of our cultural institutions and our public sector. Keeping these resources in the public sector and ensuring that they are freely available to everyone is the key to bridging the UK's widening digital divide: the chasm between those who can access digital information via internet access at home and the 27% of households who cannot. Last week, Amazon announced that it was working with libraries in the US to allow users to borrow Kindle ebooks. This mutual co-operation between the private and the public sector should allow more people to access shared digital resources and hopefully help bridge the US digital divide.As Peter Singer and others have argued, we need to develop a digital library that can make resources available in the same way as Google Books but that will be accountable to the public. Google Books is one of the largest digital libraries in the world but, as Robert Darnton has argued, we cannot trust it to be the sole custodian of our digital archives forever. A national digital library would be subject to regulations to protect our cultural heritage and would take responsibility for the artefacts placed in its care. Publicly funded libraries and archives are important precisely because they are not committed to the "market fundamentalism" of pursuing profit above all other motives. Some libraries and archives need to modernise and make resources digitally available but this requires support and the protection of our public sector libraries.Google's motto is "don't be evil". Not doing the evil thing is not the same as doing the right thing. In this instance, it has done the right thing: next time, it may not.GoogleDigital videoLibrariesInternetUnited StatesSimon Barronguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Werner Herzog Enters 'The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams'

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Terri Gross, Werner Herzog - Apr. 25 (Interview) - In 1994, three French cave explorers discovered hundreds of prehistoric paintings and engravings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Carbon dating has since shown that the depictions of rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears, horses, bison, mammoths and other animals are between 30,000 and 32,000 years old. That doesn't mean the ancient drawings are any less sophisticated than what artists create today, says filmmaker Werner Herzog. "Art ... as it bursts on the scene 32,000 years ago, is fully accomplished. It doesn't start with 'primitive scribblings' and first attempts like children would make drawings," Herzog says. "It's absolutely and fully accomplished." The acclaimed German director, who has produced, written and directed more than 40 films, gained exclusive access to the Chauvet caves. He tells their story and the story of the world's oldest cave paintings in The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3-D documentary film. "Since early adolescence, I have been fascinated by cave paintings," Herzog tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It actually was my personal intellectual awakening ... and shook me to the core — seeing an image of a horse [from the] prehistoric Stone Age. I couldn't believe it." Part of Herzog's interest in the paintings, he says, is the knowledge that tens of thousands of years ago, humans had the instinct to make art in order to represent the world around them.

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The one and only Liz

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Editorial Staff - Mar. 24 (Editorial) - There's no doubt that Elizabeth Taylor defined 'celebrity' for the modern age.

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The Google Books settlement should teach the company humility. It won't

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Siva Vaidyanathan - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - Google has been humbled. For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg. But yesterday federal Judge Denny Chin did just that. He ruled—after more than two years of study and debate—that the elaborate new used-book store that Google had designed in collaboration with the most elite authors and publishers could not stand. Or, at least, Chin ruled that the methods Google chose to build this massive digital bookstore, now called Google Books, was improper.

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:25:51 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By James Fallows - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

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Dana Goodyear: Barry Michels, the therapist for blocked screenwriters.

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:30:43 -0700

New Yorker - By Dana Goodyear - Mar. 13 - The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and

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