john.bowers

"Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good,” Minter says. “That’s a great simple..."

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:52:00 -0400

““Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good,” Minter says. “That’s a great simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons he’s had so much traction.””

- From NPR http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/ieconomy/acclaimed-apple-critic-made-details

Mike Daisey has now admitted on record to having made up most of the details of his Apple-Is-So-Evil story he has been hypnotizing the media with (and me for that matter.)

This is why things stories like Daisey’s should be taken with a grain of salt.

AIDS: Why Africa suffers for the West’s sins

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:17:50 -0400

AIDS: Why Africa suffers for the West’s sins:

It is really amusing to me that this is in Salon. I seem to remember Salon and like-minded Western media lambasting the Pope over his declaration that condom use is not the best way to curb the spread of HIV in Africa (and a quick Google search returned page after page of Salon’s open blog doing exactly this). And yet, in the Salon article linked:

But Westerners had condoms on their minds. The U.S. government and other organizations made a huge bet on condoms and reasoned that if you could just get enough of them to people in vulnerable places you could reverse the epidemic. Instead, reported usage of condoms in some African societies went to rates far higher than anywhere else but HIV also went up.

And a little further on (bold emphasis mine):

When [Ugandan] leaders said zero grazing, Ugandans understood at an intuitive level that having sex with your primary partner is much safer than having sex with a primary partner and others. If a large number of people make a relatively small change in their number of sex partners it can make a massive difference in the spread of HIV.

Which is exactly what the Pope said. The pushing of condom use on the Africans as a way of the Great-White-Savior saving those poor Africans is simply the new Western-liberal colonialism. Nice to see Salon publishing an article that actually analyzes the facts rather than espousing heated rhetoric with little to back it up.

katherine:

Some of this I knew from living on a Ugandan hospital compound for six months and volunteering at a rural orphanage, where the children were mostly orphaned by malaria or abandoned out of extreme poverty. It’s particularly interesting to read this after tackling Tim Butcher’s Blood River last month — a really accessible travel narrative of Butcher’s trip along the Congo River, with plenty of history folded in.

Been a really good ice climbing season despite the weather. Wish...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:28:58 -0500

Keene Ice Canyon

Me at Adams, MA

Ben at Adams, MA

Been a really good ice climbing season despite the weather. Wish it weren’t ending so soon, but I am looking forward to climbing some rock.

Thomas in Keene (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:51:24 -0500

Thomas in Keene (Taken with instagram)

Thomas eating a Bon Bon. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:42:31 -0500

Thomas eating a Bon Bon. (Taken with instagram)

? (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:40:38 -0500

? (Taken with instagram)

guardian: Handler Ron Ploucha holds Punxsutawney Phil during...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:57:10 -0500

guardian:

Handler Ron Ploucha holds Punxsutawney Phil during Groundhog Day celebrations in Pennsylvania. On leaving his burrow, Phil saw his shadow, which is said to augur six more weeks of winter.

Photo: Jeff Swensen

This disproves the whole thing completely. For there to be six more weeks of winter implies we have already had weeks of winter, which clearly we haven’t.

Question for Climbers: How to hike/camp with a crash pad?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:34:27 -0500

Does anyone have some practical advice/experience for packing and hauling a crashpad along with your pack for a multi-day hike?

Rice Tea

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:18:19 -0500

I discovered rice tea when I was in Seoul. It helped carry me through that all-too-common travel nightmare of having a head cold in the capital city of a foreign country 25 miles from its crazy and nuclear weapon brandishing neighbor on the same day that it decides to provoke said neighbor by staging military drills just off the coast. Not the greatest day of travel I’ve ever had, but the tea was quite good.

Today, for some reason, I decided I wanted some rice tea and found out via the all-knowing interwebs how to make it. Easy. Just roast some brown rice in a bare skillet or on a baking pan and then put it into a tea infuser with a few green tea leaves. It is most excellent. I’m on my second cup of the day, and this time I didn’t even add the green tea. It’s quite nutty, and if you can get over the this tastes like no tea I’ve ever had problem, it is quite delicious.

New burger joint in downtown Amherst. Sweet! (Taken with...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:07:28 -0500

New burger joint in downtown Amherst. Sweet! (Taken with instagram)

Sorel Falcon Ridge slippers I got from my family for Christmas....

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:52:44 -0500

Sorel Falcon Ridge slippers I got from my family for Christmas. They are toasty and comfortable and I wear them every day. I even took them to Farley for a day of climbing to get me feet warm on belay.

Bad self shot. (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:42:37 -0500

Bad self shot. (Taken with instagram)

Ready to climb. Photo by Ben.

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:40:48 -0500

Ready to climb. Photo by Ben.

Miles out. Time to head home. (Taken with Instagram at Wendell...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:40:14 -0500

Miles out. Time to head home. (Taken with Instagram at Wendell State Forest)

Snow and steel. (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:37:06 -0500

Snow and steel. (Taken with instagram)

Out to the ice. Photo by Ben. (Taken with Instagram at Wendell...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:37:00 -0500

Out to the ice. Photo by Ben. (Taken with Instagram at Wendell State Forest)

Belay On: OK in all honesty...PIPA is not that bad.

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:17:00 -0500

Belay On: OK in all honesty...PIPA is not that bad. :

The problem with PIPA is not what it targets—none of the strong critics of PIPA (or SOPA) oppose targeting piracy. The problem with PIPA is that there is no real recourse against a copyright holder who makes a false copyright claim (we’ve already seen the result of this from the DMCA, where plenty of fair use videos were taken down from, e.g. YouTube, because of erroneous complaints on the part of the copyright holders only to be later reinstated. That reinstatement could only occur because the DMCA has a real appeals process so that large companies with lots of money can’t completely bully the little guy out—PIPA has no such appeals process).

Another problem is that once you have been blacklisted, there is virtually no way to get un-blacklisted. If you aren’t a US company, you may not even be notified that you are being moved against in the US and once its done its done. I can see this as an easy way for domestic corporations to eliminate competition by foreign companies.

Finally, this is scratching an itch that doesn’t need to be scratched. It is already illegal to pirate in this country. The reason PIPA (and SOPA) exist at all is that the big copyright holders (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) are tired of having to go after actual infringers (it’s time consuming) and would prefer to just carpet bomb the internet to blast them out. They want a method that puts more power in their own hands, even though there are already sufficient methods for dealing with this in the courts.

Plus, if this were applied domestically (which it currently isn’t, but this is clearly a stepping stone strategy), sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Tumblr would be in serious trouble. Why? Because there is plenty of copyright infringement on all of these sites and a decent legal team should be able to show Tumblr page after Tumblr page to argue that Tumblr is dedicated to infringing material—which is the PIPA (not SOPA) requirement. This essentially overthrows the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA, which were put in for a very good reason—that to allow for user generated content, you have to hold the users and not the harbors responsible for the content (as long as the harbor responds to takedown requests in a reasonable time frame), otherwise it is just too costly to run a harbor.

Oh, one last thing: it also targets sites that give you methods for removing DRM. The courts are still out, in some sense, on whether this should be legal or not, but many of us think it should be legal to remove DRM. Why can’t I buy a DVD and rip it to my iPod? If PIPA goes through they will be able to shut down sites that provide applications like HandBrake that have 1.) completely legitimate uses—you can make your own DVDs of say, home movies and then rip them later if you lost the files and 2.) what should be legitimate uses, of backing up your own stuff.

I should have one post-script here: I don’t pirate. So I don’t care a whip about protecting things like the PirateBay.

EDIT: You said that it is only targeting websites that are “deliberately violating copyright infringement [sic].” This isn’t true. It is targeting websites that are primarily used by their users for copyright infringement, which is different. And the language is vague enough for potentially broad interpretations. What if, for example, it turns out that almost every DropBox user at some point passes an image to a friend using his or her DropBox that was ripped from a website somewhere? Potentially, an argument could be made that DropBox is being primarily used for piracy, and then be shut down. So DropBox would have to start looking through our personal files (!) to make sure we weren’t ever infringing.

orotund-hoyden:

It is only targeting websites that are deliberately violating copyright infringement, like MegaUpload. So yes, I’m a little bummed I wouldn’t be able to watch missed TV episodes, or download free music, but you know what? That’s illegal, and I’m okay with supporting the artists that worked their…

It was cold today, 13 degrees cold. Ben and I hit up the secret...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:48:31 -0500

It was cold today, 13 degrees cold. Ben and I hit up the secret climbing spot on Mt. Tom for some top-roped dry tooling. Bonnie spent her time keeping me company on belay and chewing on snow.

It’s that kind of Sunday (post mass, of course).

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:07:53 -0500

It’s that kind of Sunday (post mass, of course).

Ice gully. (Taken with Instagram at Mt Tom State Reservation)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:13:57 -0500

Ice gully. (Taken with Instagram at Mt Tom State Reservation)