People are willing to pay for content. They just want the price to be fair, reasonable, and just. When content holders try to charge monopoly rents, even the most law-abiding individual is tempted to become part of the “information wants to be free” sloganeering hordes. If that’s correct, we can expect Rumblefish’s Friendly Music service to be widely embraced by the public. The NYTimes: For [$1.99] the user gets the full version of the song and can edit it as well. The new...

His office has confirmed. Nate Silver points out: Byrd’s current term expires on January 3, 2013. Under West Virginia state law on handling Senate vacancies, “if the vacancy occurs less than two years and six months before the end of the term, the Governor appoints someone to fill the unexpired term and there is no election”. Otherwise, Manchin would appoint an interim replacement, and an special election would be held in November to determine who held the seat in 2011 and 2012....

Ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court last August, the unusual hearing began today in the case of Georgia death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis. Typically such hearings are held on procedural grounds; today’s hearing was to give Davis a chance to prove his innocence. The hearing came almost 20 years after a jury convicted him of killing a Savannah police officer despite no physical evidence or even any physical description, and no weapon, no fingerprints, and no DNA. The AJC story on today’s...

Hate crimes have always been a controversial class of crime. Now, the NYTimes reports, prosecutors are winning stiffer sentences by employing a novel definition: [I]n Queens [NY] since 2005, at least five people have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, committing a very different kind of hate crime — singling out elderly victims for nonviolent crimes like mortgage fraud because they believed older people would be easy to deceive and might have substantial savings or home equity. And this month,...

CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER? The new documentary, Gasland, won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and premieres on HBO tonight. In it, filmmaker Josh Fox takes on a 24 state journey to examine the environmental and health consequences of natural gas drilling. His focus is Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process by which millions of gallons of water and chemicals are shot at high pressure into wells deep beneath the ground to break up rock formations and release trapped...

In commenting on the high crime rate in a nearby city, a white colleague said, “but that’s just black-on-black violence.” Just? Say what? First, in a country that is essentially still segregated (and not necessarily by black people’s choice) what race do you expect for both victim and perpetrators to be? Language like ”black-on-black violence” effectively smacks a racial label on problems that are socioeconomic and thus the collective, moral responsibility of every...

In a story wondering whether the oil gushing in the Gulf is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced, several environmental historians agreed: “The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University. Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture...

Steven Berlin Johnson answers Nick Carr’s supposition that the distracting links and brevity of modern reading are undermining the deep and immersive focus that is the defining benefit of the book: The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged...

Ironically, for this most barbarously antiquated means of carrying out a death sentence: Shortly after midnight [Mountain Time] in the US state of Utah, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff picked up his Apple iPhone, opened up a Twitter “app” on his handset and began tweeting. But Mr Shurtleff’s 134-character composition was no ordinary post. This was not a piece of miscellany from the 53-year-old’s home life, a link chosen to amuse or interest his followers, nor even a political...

Late last night YouTube released an online video editor through TestTube, their ideas incubator: Without installing any software, it allows you to: Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos  Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click — no upload necessary Early word is the process...

The last article of the four-page Goldman Sachs’s “Code of Business Conduct and Ethics” stipulates that “From time to time, the firm may waive certain provisions of this Code.” Really? Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal spoke with Greg Unruh, director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics, about that ‘safety valve’ provision: RYSSDAL: Rising once more to Goldman’s defense, Sarbanes-Oxley — the financial reform bill that came in after Enron — said listen,...

The end of email conversation got going again this week when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference that only 11% of teens email daily: “E-mail–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away,” she said. With that I remember the 2006 prediction of the end of the wristwatch: Have you looked at any kids lately? I mean really looked at them. Have you noticed anything different? They don’t wear watches. Really. Ask...

BP shares climbed as the company suspended dividend: BP has apologized for the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and agreed to put $20 billion aside to make sure all compensation claims are handled swiftly and fairly. BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told reporters after meeting President Obama at the White House that BP will not pay any further dividends this year. And it looks like Ken Feinberg, now the administration’s “pay czar,” will have new responsibilities: The White House and...

My friend Sam sent pictures of the second annual New York City Naked Bike Ride. Protesters chanted, “Less gas, more a…!” The ride went The Gothamist has a “pretty SFW” gallery. So what’s the big idea? A World Naked Bike Ride: It’s time to put a stop to the indecent exposure of people and the planet to cars and the pollution they create. According to the United Nations, close to a million species of plants and animals could disappear from the face of the...

In Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday, the NYTimes takes a feature look at the Singularity, “a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.” An obvious focus of the piece is the Singularity’s primary proponent and advocate, futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is Chancellor and Trustee of Singularity University, sponsored by NASA,...

During a homily in St Peter’s Square delivered before 15,000 priests from around the world to conclude what was to be a year of celebrations, the pope issued his strongest apology yet. Still no specifics about what will change. Except stronger controls on choosing men who enter the priesthood: “In admitting men to priestly ministry and in their formation we will do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation and make every effort to accompany priests along their journey,...

An analogy with the ring of truth, from Business Week no less: This is a moment to think big and creatively. As distant as risky drilling rigs off Louisiana may seem from the New York financial laboratories where wizard bankers synthesized subprime credit derivatives, Obama could explain the important connections: how, after decades of antiregulatory fundamentalism in Washington, the feckless Minerals Management Service became the Securities & Exchange Commission of the oil business. It is no...

Farhad Manjoo describes today’s Steve Jobs’ keynote speech as underwhelming: Gizmodo did Jobs’ presentation for him. In April, the gadget site purchased and dissected an iPhone prototype that an Apple employee had left behind in a Bay Area bar, and in May, another prototype somehow surfaced on a tech blog in Vietnam. As punishment, Apple banished Gizmodo from Jobs’ speech at the company’s developer conference this morning. (No word on what terrible fate will befall...

John Herrman says Microsoft — “the lumbering giant, the sprawling monster” with more experience online than Apple and Google combined — is best positioned for Our Future in the Cloud: [O]ur phones will be mere extensions of our online epicenters; bulging hubs of data from which we conduct our computing, and our lives. Of course [Microsoft's new social network-y, seriously flawed, and fatally overpriced teenage-aimed feature phones dubbed] Kin and Windows Phone will share...

Bravo Gizmodo: In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping...

In London he told The Guardian that the new interface is not transparently intuitive. It’s inherently confusing and has to be learned: “There were really a lot of usability problems in this first-generation of iPad applications. It’s often quite difficult for people to discover what they have to do because the options are not very visible. I have to say of both the device itself and the content, it’s very attractive, which is good. But at the same time, overemphasising the...

An excerpt of Nicholas Carr’s new book is featured in the June Wired. In it Carr says the Internet “is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.” A shallow neuroscience explanation: The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system… Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved...

According to a new survey [pdf]. Still, we’re happy with the service. Ars Technica: Clearly, broadband is the business to be in—a trade in which most of your customers have only a vague idea what they’re actually getting and don’t necessarily think you should always give it to them. But whatever it is, they like it just fine, thanks. These reported plateaus of technological savvy seem to cross all demographic boundaries. Seventy-one percent of men did not know their advertised...

AT&T’s $30 “unlimited” smartphone data plans are going away (though if you’re on it you’re grandfathered in and if you want it you can still get it). Starting June 7 pricing is either a $15 per month “DataPlus” plan for 200MB ($15 for each additional 200MB) or $25 for a “DataPro” 2GB plan ($10 for each additional GB). You can switch on the fly, including retroactively switching your current month’s plan if you find you’ve gone...

In the 90′s I believed in multitasking. I was wrong. The human capacity for multitasking is a myth. In the aughts I believed in links — still do. Maybe I’m wrong again. Nick Carr thinks so: Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d...