Twenty-five years after the first queen of hip-hop was stiffed on her royalty checks, Dr. Roxanne Shante boasts an Ivy League Ph.D. – financed by a forgotten clause in her first record deal.
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After two albums, Shante said, she was disillusioned by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company. The teen mother, living in the Queensbridge Houses, recalled how her life was shattered.
"Everybody was cheating with the contracts, stealing and telling lies," she said. "And to find out that I was just a commodity was heartbreaking."
As it turned out…the record company tossed in a clause in her contract where they basically agreed to finance her college education, probably figuring (according to the article) that a teenage mom living in the projects would never make any use of it. Even so, she had to drag it out of them kicking and screaming. She found an ally in the dean at Marymount Manhattan College, who let her attend classes for free while pursuing the money. The record company (Warner Music) agreed to pay up when she threatened to go public with her story.
The company declined to comment for this story.
Doesn’t look so good to be throwing lawsuits around on the grounds that piracy steals money from the same artists you’re busy screwing over, does it?
Music brings sweetness to life and people will gladly pay for it. But nobody likes being gouged, and especially when they know full well that the artists they love are being screwed over too. The contempt you see among some younger (and older) folk for the Music Labels is merely a mirror of the contempt they fully understand the labels regard them and the artists with. It doesn’t have to be that way. My own wish is that the technology eventually makes it so easy for the artists and their listeners to cut the labels, at least the big greedy ones, out of the transaction altogether, that nobody can remember what the hell they were ever good for in the first place and they just go the way of the dinosaurs. Hell, they’re already fossilized.
Today, Amazon removed George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book store. The company also went ahead and removed any digital trace of the books, too-striking them from both users’ digital lockers and from Kindle devices.
…
This unusual maneuver, which Amazon says occurred because Orwell’s publisher changed its mind about offering the electronic version of these titles, is all the more unsettling simply because readers already purchased the books and had their ownership of the item revoked. In the Orwell book case, the item was simply no longer there-it was as if those Kindle users never owned it.
What book citizen? That book does not exist. That book never existed…
Really? Staffers that would otherwise have contributed to police work, road repair, education, and sea research were pulled in to help the governor’s office deal with the legal ins and outs of ethics complaints? That’s the official explanation for Palin’s claim now?
Well, it will be for the next five minutes. Then another lie will come along. Note in particular that ABC News’ Kate Moss did not even question her bizarre claim that she was resigning to save the state "millions" in frivolous lawsuits, a claim that was suspicious on its face, debunked on the blogs and now a proven lie. But on ABC News, stenographers to the powerful, Kate Snow just sat there and let Palin state…
This would be the same ABC News that claimed that Matthew Shepard knew his killers, that he was a druggie, and that his murder was a meth fueled robbery gone bad, not a sickeningly typical-in-its-brutality gay bashing? That ABC News?
Posted by CmdrTaco from the are-you-really-surprised dept.
David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won’t read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."
ODF: The open standard file format that only Microsoft applications can use…
[Update…] In comments Jonathan Allen points out that ODF is the Oasis Group open document standard, not Microsoft’s, which is OpenXML. I was confusing the two, and the point of the Slashdot post. This isn’t about Microsoft’s own proprietary open standard. It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF. Here’s some of the Slashdot commentary…
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It’s not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1’s far from perfect, as we can see.
…
That is, curiously, not quite true. ODF 1.1 doesn’t fully specify formulas, but it does specify the general syntax that should be used for them, and Microsoft seems to have ignored this. (Also, in practice, the major spreadsheets are quite similar in terms of what expressions they accept in formulas. This makes it relatively simple to convert between MS Office formulas and OpenOffice.org ones, which are what most ODF-based apps use.)
…
The irony here is that the formula language used by OpenOffice (and by other vendors) is based on that used by Excel, which itself was not fully documented when OpenOffice implemented it. So an argument, by Microsoft, not to support that language because it is not documented is rather hypocritical. Excel supports 1-2-3 files and formulas and legacy Excel versions (back to Excel 4.0) neither of which have standardized formula languages. Why are these supported? Also, the fact that the Microsoft/CleverAge add-in correctly reads and writes the legacy ODF formula syntax shows not only that it can be done, but that Microsoft already has the code to do it. The inexplicably thing is why that code never made it into Excel 2007 SP2.
Just look at this. They’re in complete technical compliance, and yet if you read an ODF file format spreadsheet into Excel and then write it back out again it’s now locked utterly into MS Office’s specific implementation of ODF. You can no longer read it back into any other spreadsheet program that supports ODF, because it can’t read Microsoft’s ODF formula implementation.
They just never stop, do they? I started out as a Microsoft platforms developer. Now I work on software that runs on many different platforms and swear to God I will never again be a Microsoft only developer. I will not help them betray the promise of the personal computer. I will not help them put handcuffs on the whole goddamned world just because that’s their business model.
I read online today that Amazon has stopped ranking gay themed titles. This is having the effect, intended or not, of pushing a whole genre of publishing off your lists, and into the closet. Even the children’s book "Heather Has Two Mommies" has been de-ranked and thereby de-listed. Or, put another way, closeted. Only Kindle editions are listed now when you search Gay and Lesbian bestsellers, because the print editions have had their rankings stripped.
What were you thinking when you did this? As a gay man, and a frequent customer here, I am more unhappy to read about this then I can express. It’s one thing to keep sexually graphic content out of sight of minors, but another thing entirely to push anything having to do with the lives of gay people into the closet. That, simply put, is bigotry. A kind of bigotry I thought Amazon wasn’t really interested in trading in.
And here I was, just about to purchase another lawn and garden tool…something I need and can’t seem to find locally. Like the lawn mower blade I bought some time ago. Oh…and all the mp3s I’ve been buying lately…I have some more titles I was going to search for. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t buy a song, or a book, or some other product, from Amazon. But not now. You need to seriously re-think this policy, and quickly, or I will not be buying a single thing more from Amazon. And considering the stink I’m seeing about this online already…I doubt I’ll be the only customer you loose over this. Get a little more common sense into your ranking policy, and the prejudice out of it. My thanks in advance.
Meta Writers has posted a list of the books that have been stripped which includes almost all novels in a user’s Top 100 Gay Novels List including James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.
Our theatre critic Kevin Sessums reports that the hardback edition of his memoir Mississippi Sissy retains a sales ranking while the ranking for the paperback edition has been stripped. Michelangelo Signorile reports that his books have all lost their rankings.
Our research shows that these books have lost their ranking: "Running with Scissors" by Augusten Burroughs; "Rubyfruit Jungle" by Rita Mae Brown, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel, "The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1" by Michel Foucault, "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition), "Little Birds: Erotica" by Anais Nin, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition), "Maurice" by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition) and "Becoming a Man" by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.
[Update…] Andrew Sullivan discovers that as far as Amazon is concerned, he’s a writer of pornography…
This has to be one of the weirdest and least defensible policy changes imaginable. Mein Kampf is fine. Jackie Collins is fine. But books about gay subjects are now "adult" on Amazon and so not included on best seller lists or rankings. Sure enough, "Virtually Normal" and "Love Undetectable" have been de-listed and stripped of customer sales rankings. Jackie Collins’ "Married Lovers" hasn’t. My books contain discussions of Aquinas and Freud and Foucault and Burke. I’m puzzled as to why those authors are more "adult" than Collins’ adulterous couplings.
Seems someone at Amazon has had a homosexual panic moment. Well…the electric pole saw I was going to order from them tonight (I have a tree I need to prune a tad…) is available on the ACE Hardware website too, which claims to ship for free to my local ACE store.
"A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy."
Well that certainly explains this…
"Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:
"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
"Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
"Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage"
And how suddenly every book with a gay theme or content in it was wiped off hundreds of Amazon book lists as if they’d never existed…but not other books with similar heterosexual themes. As I said previously, I think someone in Amazon HQ had a homosexual panic moment and made a really bad decision they thought, whilst in the grip of their homosexual panic, that it wouldn’t be noticed or much disapproved of. "Glitch" goes a long way toward explaining what happened…not. How the hell does Virtually Normal, Brokeback Mountain, and Maurice suddenly get treated like they’re pornography if this wasn’t some jackass attempt to push gay books into the closet because somebody got all upset that Amazon was treating gay folk like just another customer demographic?
Now a new theory is starting to circulate, that in fact, there was a glitch in the system, and that glitch was abused by people wanting to hurt Amazon. Here is the theory:
On each book is a feature allowing customers to tag a book with words to help people search. Someone might tag a book about Britney Spears with the words "popstar" or "meltdown", words potentially related to the book. If a book was tagged "adult" enough times, it is possible that Amazon had a system in place to remove the sales rank and remove it from the search engine, perhaps until a live person could double check it. This would fit with the statement from a customer service representative over the weekend that this was a new policy about "adult" content.
Now, a group of people makes a concerted effort to tag books they don’t like with the "adult" tag, knowing the automated system will remove them from the search. Reports have surfaced that authors have been discovering their books removed from search as early as February of this year. At that time, they complained and Amazon put the books back in the search.
This weekend is when many people became aware of the fact that so many books were disappearing, hence the firestorm. Some on the internet find it odd that the cat would be let out of the bag on Easter weekend, a religious holiday when few staff would be on hand at Amazon to deal with the fallout.
I’m generally not a conspiracy theory fan, but this has a certain ring of truth to me. Trusting the crowd to rate content is pretty common across the internet, so for Amazon to have instituted an automated feature like this would not be surprising. In fact, as I noted in my previous report, one of the books that did not disappear from search is "For The Bible Tells Me So", a positive look at homosexuality with a biblical perspective. This actually supports this theory- someone trying to eradicate books that support homosexuality might easily think this one was opposed based on the title.
Given that I’ve seen wingers doing crap like this elsewhere, it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility.
When Juan Zamora stopped to refuel his car at a Conoco service station in Richland, the gas pump’s calculator registered a total fee of $26.
But in a freak computer hiccup, the PayPal debit card he used recorded the transaction as $81,400,836,908. Yes, you read that correctly, that’s more than 81 billion dollars.
Initially, Mr. Zamora thought it must’ve been a joke. But after contacting PayPal customer service he was surprised to see that the company treated it as anything but a laughing matter.
“Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes,” Zamora said. ” ‘Did you get the gas?’ he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn’t pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!”
This is more understandable then it looks. If PayPal is outsourcing its customer service to Zimbabwe then the rep would have had no trouble believing you’d bought eighty-one billion dollars worth of gas.
If We Could Put The DRM In Your Eyes And Ears We Would
Anyone visiting my house for even a few minutes can see what a book lover I am. Casa del Garrett is full of book cases and book shelves and they’re full of books I’ve been collecting since I was a kid. Somehow during the move from Rockville to Baltimore I lost two boxes full of paperbacks and I still grieve over the loss of some of them. But to all you Star Trek fans out there I still have, for example, a bunch of first editions of James Blish’s Star Trek books, including a first printing of Spock Must Die which was the first original Star Trek novel ever published.
I have a first printing of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 in paperback, first editions in hardback of all his later sequels, 2010, 2061, and 3001. A first hardback edition of The Songs of Distant Earth. A first paperback printing of his Fountains of Paradise. I have hardback first editions of Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy, and the paperback first edition of Funeral Games. The seemingly odd mix of hardback and paperback editions tracks with times I had the money for the hardback and times I didn’t.
I have tons of other first editions on my bookshelves. I tell you this not to present myself as a book collector, but just simply as a reader. I keep nearly all the books I read. Unless I really hate it, like I absolutely despise Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which I threw across the room when I was finished with it, or unless a book bores me to tears, it will generally find a permanent home on my shelves..not as a collector’s item, but as something to pick up and read a passage from again, if not the whole thing, every so often.
I love books. They have been my escape ever since I was a kid. I can’t remember how many times I got caught in class reading a paperback hidden behind a textbook. One teacher, who managed to make the history of World War II boring, gave me a good chewing out in front of the class for about ten minutes, demanding to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class. It was all I could do to keep biting my tongue and not telling him no, just his history class.
I love to read. I spend more time at home now web surfing then watching TV because it is an act of reading and what is more, discovering links between the things I am reading and other things I’ve never read before, as opposed to passively being entertained by the tube. I am not at all averse to seeing words on a computer screen. In fact I love it. I love the way one thing can link to another, and then to another still. I love how you can browse entire libraries of books and essays and articles on this and that all from home. The Internet is the best encylopedia ever, the best instruction manual ever, the best library ever. You can explore. And it took me all of about a minute to get sick, thoroughly sick, of the hype over Amazon’s new Kindle…which is like the old Kindle, only new.
Yes books take up space. Yes, it would be nice to be able to read anything from my personal library while away from home. Books weigh tons. I’ve moved several times on the way from Rockville where I grew up to Casa del Garrett and I can tell you almost half the mass of moving my stuff is in the form of books…many, many boxes of them that just about break your back. It would be nice to just have much of it, if not all, in electric form. There’s a scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, where a space traveler reverently takes out of a sealed container his prize posession: a first edition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It was a prize because books off earth were so rare…almost non-existant. If our books are to journey with us to the stars, they’ll have to weigh a whole lot less.
But here’s the problem: Suppose you were offered a book that could only be read with a pair of reading glasses made by the publisher of the book. Oh…and the glasses will cost you $360 dollars. But you could use them to read a whole lot of other books from that same publisher. But all those books could only be read by those glasses. And whether or not those glasses kept on working was solely at the discretion of the publisher of those books. Doesn’t take much thinking to realize that all you are buying when you purchase those books, is a dust jacket only those glasses can open up…not the right to read what is inside. Those books can be closed forever to you, at the discretion of the publisher, at any time.
And it gets worse. Suppose somebody decides that the contents of a particular book are offensive in some way. Maybe its sex. Maybe it’s political. Maybe its an expose’ of corporate malfeasance that somebody in some corporate boardroom somewhere decides you shouldn’t be able to read anymore. A flick of the switch from corporate headquarters and any book in that library suddenly vanishes…like it never existed. And it happens to all the copies of that book, in everyone’s personal library, all over the world. Just like that. Snap. Gone. Censorship was never so easy, so simple, so beautifully invisiable. What book? There was never any such book.
No thank you. I learned to read before I entered grade school. I still remember a bit of how difficult it was to get what all those marks on the paper were telling me. But mom was patient and eventually I got the hang of it and that was my key to the world books opened up for me. And what a world. Down the Navajo Trail, along the back alleys and side streets of Old London, across the sea to Treasure Island, down Persia to Babylon with Alexander and through the stargate and back again. Corporate America can have my ability to read when they pry it from my cold dead eyes.
While children were nestled all snug in their beds, Apple apparently had visions of improved touch-screens in its innovative head.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed a patent application from Apple, dated Christmas Day, for a swipe-gesture system to be used on touch-screen keyboards. It would allow for a user to "perform certain functions using swipes across the key area rather than tapping particular keys," according to the patent application, authored by Wayne Westerman.
For example, the application explains that leftward, rightward, upward and downward swipes might be assigned to inserting a space, backspacing, shifting, or inserting a carriage return.
Can anyone tell us what this resembles? Anyone? Bueller?
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop, which like MacRumors explains the patent in more detail, likens the technology to a "Palm Graffiti-like interpretation layer to the standard iPhone keyboard."
In other words…Palm already did this. For those of you who never had a Palm device, they have a Graffiti text entry pad under the display window, where you can enter text using the Graffiti or Graffiti-2 gestures. Those gestures include swiping up to shift to upper case, swiping from top right to bottom left to enter a carriage return, swiping left to right to enter a space and right to left to backspace. You could also tap the bottom left corner to bring up a stylus touch keyboard on the display. You could use your fingers on it, but only if you have narrow fingers with hard nails like mine. Which is why I never fret about loosing my stylus.
In the comments to the article you find that apparently Microsoft the same thing in its Windows CE pocket PC OS. Apple’s only claim to uniqueness on this can only be that it’s layered Over the keyboard. That’s nice, but is that alone patent worthy? Of course not. It’s obvious. The innovation is the system of gestures, and Palm did that ages ago. And for all I know they may have gotten it from someone else, just like Apple got the Mac user interface from Xerox.
Our patent system is out of control. Instead of encouraging and rewarding innovation, which is the reason for its existence in the first place, it is stifling it. Worse, it’s being used as a club by large corporations to drive smaller competitors out of business. If you invent a new technology, I can make a tiny change to it, file a patent on it, and then not only do I get to use your technology for free, I prevent you from capitalizing on it.
How To Wrest News From The TV In 21st Century America
Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese. But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington. You just have to adjust your perspective a tad.
For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.
One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.
EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.
Rule of thumb: When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.
What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean. Swell. That’s really swell. Glad to hear it. But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?
That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.
Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.
But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.
All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.
And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light. But NBC isn’t just a television network. It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation. In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about. So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits? They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.
Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole. But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA. They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line. No more. The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.
Via SLOG… Ever wonder what a McDonald’s hamburger would look like after sitting for 12 years in a plastic container at room temperature? See it Here.
Don’t be afraid to look. It actually won’t gross you out until you think about it for a while. Because…see…it looks perfectly normal. Not the slightest hint of rancidness. None. No sign of mold. Not on the meat, and even more alarmingly, not on the bun either, which according to the author of that blog post, is getting a tad crumbly. But…no mold.
I’m a single guy…just in case my occasional public bouts of loneliness here on the blog haven’t clued anyone in to that fact. I buy food for one, and often that’s a hassle because it’s hard to find food in single guy portions, or packaged such that I can use just a part of it and keep the rest for later. So I buy, for example, a loaf of bread, and if it’s good bread, meaning it’s fresh baked locally and not loaded with preservatives and other additives, it starts getting stale before I finish it off more often then not. I can’t finish a whole loaf of bread by myself in under a week, and by the end of the week more often then not I see the first few specs of mold on it before it’s halfway finished and then I have to give the rest to the birds.
And here’s this friggin’ McDonald’s bun after twelve years and not a spec of mold on it anywhere. Wow… Just…wow…
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