“Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell the truth[...]. Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual MacWorld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its corporate governance. Apple tells analysts far less about its operations than most companies do. It turns low-level decisions into state secrets. Directors are often left out of the loop. And it dissembles with impunity.”
Jobs' retort:
“This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”
Charming.
Enjoy your iPhones! 
The Internet wasn't invented for business, or banking, or email, or communicating with loved ones, or blogging.
It was invented so that I can watch videos of Lykke Li singing in the back of a black London cab.
Sigh. I suppose it's normal that my first post in a few weeks here would be about Facebook.
So, some dude set up a mischievous fake Facebook profile for some other dude in London, and ended up having to pay £22,000 in damages for libel and breach of privacy.
A businessman whose personal details were "laid bare" in fake entries on the Facebook social networking website has won a libel case at the High Court.
Mathew Firsht was awarded £22,000 in damages against an old school friend, Grant Raphael, who created the profile.
I'm not exactly sure how much £22,000 equals in real money, but I think the conversion process in my head puts it hovering somewhere near a gazillion dollars.
Why is this semi somewhat passingly important?
Our 2008 session at the Allied Media Conference with Dean Jansen last month covered the use of open source tools to create professional-level multimedia content. We explored the benefits of shooting in the RAW file format if you're printing a 'zine, used Audacity to create an audio podcast, put together a stop-motion slideshow from photos taken at the conference using command-line tools, and created some video to share on the AMC site. Then, Dean showcased Miro and explored different ways to distribute your content.
Most importantly, though, we all got to know each other. Depending on the audience, I like to pass my camcorder around during my sessions so that the audience can interview each other (the AMC audience is fully and completely awesome, as always). Here is the video that we all created so that you can get to know us too. Spread the word!
Here is a short slideshow from the 2008 Allied Media Conference.
Music: Flobots - We Are Winning
Hi everyone, meet Stoly. He's a humanoid biped carnivore who likes to dance:
Embed:
He was created using the free Spore Creature Creator Trial, for Windows and Mac.
Spore is one of those upcoming games that I'm a little conflicted about. On the one hand it was developed by Will Wright at Maxis, one of my all-time favorite gaming shops. On the other hand, Maxis is now owned by EA / the Walmart of game publishers. I won't go into the reason why Electronic Arts sucks - all you need to know is that together with Ubisoft, they are the worst thing to happen to digital entertainment innovation since someone gave Hideo Kojima a computer.
Anyhow, in the vein of games like Black and White, SimCity and, well, pretty much every other other Maxis game, what's unique about Spore is that it will give you near-complete control over the game experience, and lets you design your own race of super- (or sub-) creatures, all the way from being a single-cell organism to establishing an interstellar civilization. In that sense, it's as much a toy as a game (the creature creator being a good example of this), and one of the few games out there that I would encourage young kids to play.
If you're on Windows or Mac you can download the trial and start making your own creatures. Even cooler, you can create videos (duh) and photos of your creations and share them with the Spore community market base. There's also tight integration to directly upload your videos to Youtube, though that's useless to me since I don't have a Youtube account.
I'm split between pre-ordering what could be a very inspiring game, and refusing to give monopolistic companies more of my hard-earned cash.
For now, though, you can enjoy my video of Stoly - and I swear promise assure you that he wasn't named after a favorite brand of Vodka... 
Vanessa Miller has posted a great set of pics from the Allied Media Conference over on Metromix Detroit - they really capture the spirit of the conference. Click the pic to see the rest.
Pictured here is the amazing Grace Lee Boggs.
WAYS (the World Association of Young Scientists) and PYRN (the Permafrost Young Researchers Network) are two projects among many other science-focused social networking initiatives I work on. They are featured in this video (German only) on wisskomm.tv. On one hand it's great to see our networks start to gain some critical mass and exposure, and on the other it's mostly just fun for me to hear my buddy Hugues speaking German...
Today, I eased my way back into my regular diet after spending 3 weeks in the U.S. eating, well, well... Ethiopian in Washington DC (obviously), and Mexifornian in SF. Not to mention all the munchies you get when, you know, you're in California.
Dude, did you know that Mike and Ikes cost, like less than a buck a box over there? They're like $3+ here! They are the food of the Gods, who must be benevolent, all-knowing, gentle Gods if they share their Mike and Ike - Bursting with Fruit Juice Flavor® - with us.
There were other memorable moments, like when I had a craving for In-N-Out Burger, Carl's Jr and Jack-In-The-Box - all at the same time, which was fortunate since they are all on the same street corner down from my cousin's house. In between that and my family's incomparable Iraqi food, I got a little sluggish.
