.:.

Good basketball has me out of my seat waving, whooping, and worrying; wonderful emotions that come out during the NBA Playoffs. My neighbors must love me. Here’s a little audio excerpt of a great moment. I love it when the announcers are having just as good a time.

Over the last few years I’ve purchased music online from a variety of sites. Aside from wanting files that sound good, a hard requirement is songs must be DRM-free. Yep, that mostly means the iTunes store is out.¹

My favorite place to buy/download music is bleep.com. There are two reasons:

1. very high quality, DRM-free tracks
2. an awesome music preview system

(more…)

1. I did buy one DRM-free track via iTunes when iTunes-plus launched (as a vote of support), but I have yet to find any other iTunes-plus tracks I’m interested in. Seriously, every time I look for an album it’s only available wrapped in iTunes’ DRM. With the advent of amazonmp3.com, I’m probably going to stop checking the iTunes store at all. More on that later. [↩]

In a very interesting article about suicide bombing in Halo 3, the author describes how the “psychology of asymmetrical warfare” led him to take up the tactic. The article is not about the game but about his insight into when suicide tactics become the reasonable choice.

Even though I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

While looking for some voting information on San Francisco’s government website, I saw this press release: Wikipedia to Relocate to San Francisco. Basically, the Wikimedia Foundation will be moving here at the beginning of 2008. Hopefully, that will bring more local talks by Jimmy Wales. The last time I heard him was at Stanford when Mosuki was attending Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri’s class: Literacy of Cooperation. Jimmy Wales’ lecture was one of my favorite.

It’s been a while since I’ve thought about the class, but it was quite good. We got to meet a lot of very interesting people with provocative ideas. The syllabus and class web page appear gone, but Markus Sandy has a good description and many of the lectures are on the Internet Archive.

Originally posted to the Self-Referential Orgy (SRO) list.

Some people on this list will probably be interested to know that this morning began the first jury trial between the RIAA and someone they accuse of sharing pirated music via KaZaa. So far, out of the 20,000 cases the RIAA has made against people for pirating, this is the first one to actually make it to court.

Ars Technica is at the trial and making reports. Here are some choice parts:

• Sony BMG’s chief anti-piracy lawyer: “Copying” music you own is “stealing”

• RIAA anti-P2P campaign a real money pit, according to testimony

And the latest entry:

• Defendant’s counsel hammers away at piracy picture painted by RIAA

Which has this humorous bit:

Judge Michael Davis gave his assent to the demonstration, and, after the jury filed back into the courtroom, Thomas ripped two CDs, timing it on her cell phone. When the first CD was done, she announced the time as 2:36.18. Gabriel immediately objected saying that they timed it at over four minutes. The apparently-amused judge said that the jurors could figure out the time for themselves. The second CD ripped in 2:17.71 according to the defendant’s timing (I timed the second demonstration in 2:18.97). Gabriel again objected, saying that he had it at three-and-a-half minutes.