JoeWindish.com

According to a new report from the iSuppli research firm, the television industry will soon experience “an acute undersupply” of LEDs, the solid-state lighting source used in LCD TVs to create superior video imagery compared to standard LCD TVs, which use fluorescent lamps.

Oftentimes, opponents of Public Knowledge suggest that our calls for a balanced copyright is really a call for everything to be free. First off, this is wrong. Balanced copyright is an attempt to find a way to promote creation without restricting innovation or creativity (or “balance” the rights of the creators of the past, creators of the future, and the public), not make everything free (for the 2 page handout version of PK’s take on balanced copyright, click here (PDF)). Second, and what really annoys me, is the implication that there is no real value to works once they are in the public domain. While this is kind of an ongoing pet peeve of mine, two articles related to the new Alice in Wonderland movie from Sunday’s New York Times really drove it home.

In response to a request on Wed., Feb. 24, 2010, from the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittees, today University System of Georgia (USG) Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr. submitted documents detailing how the USG and its 35 colleges and universities would manage an additional $300 million in reductions to state appropriations in the upcoming Fiscal Year 2011 budget.

Media traditionally has gained its profits by owning distribution. Cable carriage, network airwaves, newsstand distribution and printing presses... The web changed all that and promised that economics in the media business would be driven by content and intent: the best content will win, driven by the declared intent of consumers who find it and share it. Search+Social was the biggest wave to hit media since the printing press. And the open technology to make better and better experiences has been on a ten year tear: blogging software, Flash, Ajax, HTML 5, Android, and more and more coming... But the iPad, just like the iPhone, is designed for vertical integration and distribution lock in... It's an old school, locked in distribution channel that doesn't want to play by the new rules of search+social.

Nora interviewed danah boyd and William Deresiewicz about the nature of friendship online — whether social networking has changed what we mean when we say ‘friend,’ and how digital tools like Facebook and MySpace ask us to define, categorize, and list our friends.

IMPORTANT RESOURCE: We are very excited to announce the lineup of participants for our special February programming on Race and the Supreme Court, in recognition of Black History Month.

From 2007 so old for a world in flux. But worth remembering: "Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.

The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure."

A new generation of young, hip and occasionally tattooed librarians is driving them out. They call themselves guybrarians, cybrarians and "information specialists," and they blog at sites like The Free Range Librarian and The Lipstick Librarian. They can be found in droves on Second Life, but also outside the Republican National Convention, dodging tear gas canisters and tweeting the location of the police.

I'm preparing a post on the re-segregation of America. Will likely incorporate this: "The name of White Settlement originated as a result of there being two settlements in the area: one occupied predominantly by Native Americans (near where Fort Worth, TX is located today), and the other one being occupied by white settlers. The latter settlement received the name "White Settlement" as a way to distinguish itself from the Native American settlement. The city was incorporated in 1941.

On October 14, 2005, City leaders announced a plan to have local voters decide on a possible name change for the town from White Settlement to West Settlement. In the November 8 election, the name change was overwhelmingly rejected by a vote of 2388 to 219."

2005????

Expiration dates are intended to inspire confidence, but they only invest us with a false sense of security. The reality is that the onus lies with consumers to judge and maintain the freshness and edibility of their food—by checking for offensive slime, rank smells, and off colors. Perhaps, then, we should do away with dates altogether and have packages equipped with more instructive guidance on properly storing foods, and on detecting spoilage. Better yet, we should focus our efforts on what really matters to our health—not spoilage bacteria, which are fairly docile, but their malevolent counterparts: disease-causing pathogens like salmonella and Listeria, which infect the food we eat not because it's old but as a result of unsanitary conditions at factories or elsewhere along the supply chain. A new system that could somehow prevent the next E. coli outbreak would be far more useful to consumers than a fairly arbitrary set of labels that merely (try to) guarantee taste.

"It's [the filibuster]just brought the process to a halt, and the public is suffering. So the minority needs to have a right. I think that's important. But the public has a right to see its business done. And not routinely allow a small minority to keep us from addressing the great issues that face this country. I think the filibuster absolutely needs to be changed."

Pogue on Buzz: Funny, isn’t it? It’s a running joke that Google labels many of its services as “beta” (meaning “in testing”) — and leaves that label in place for years. And here’s Buzz, a truly beta product that isn’t labeled that way.

Buzz probably won’t make much of a dent in Facebook or Twitter or FriendFeed. But because it’s nicely integrated with Gmail and Google chat, because it has powerful and flexible features and because millions of Gmail members can get in with a single click, Buzz will have its own following. In other words, its complex design is a challenge that Google will have to overcome — but it’s not enough to be a Buzzkill.

Dazzling: a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. A video in which Goggles to takes a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English.

"Microsoft just planted a massive flag in the ground with the debut of Windows Phone 7 Series. The company's new mobile operating system is a radical and potent departure from the past, and there's a lot to take in …"

Carr's seminal 2003 article, "Are we spending too much on technology? This provocative Harvard Business Review excerpt suggests that IT no longer conveys competitive advantage, so invest your capital elsewhere."

Critique of Carr & Cloud computing: "Carr's vision is either utopian or dystopian, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it mixes a few likely trends with lots of naive wishful thinking, unsound logic, and sophomoric shock value."

The donation, in true social media fashion, was announced via tweets from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Mitch Kapor. Neither Google nor the Wikimedia Foundation have made an official announcement yet — it’s supposed to come tomorrow.

The video.

Their press release.

He likes it. A lot. Says it's too bad it won't work w/Macs. Microsoft will be more demanding with the hardware companies. Ships in about 6 mos.

"Instead of revamping Windows Mobile software, which first came out in 2002, Microsoft decided to start from scratch. The result is a completely new look and feel to previous generations of Microsoft Windows Mobile software."

Brin: I don’t actually think the question of whether this is the Chinese government is that important. ... even if there were a Chinese government agent behind it, it might represent a fragment of policy as it were. I think that there are many people there and have different views. If you look at when we entered China and did Chinese operations in 2006...things really improved in the subsequent years. I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding that...but were were actually able to censor less and less and the competitors there were also able to censor less and less. We from the outside provided notification when laws prevented us from showing information and competitors followed suit. But I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. There’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. So the situation really took a turn for the worse.

"Maybe it's a generational thing," says Cody Bayne, club promoter at Fubar in West Hollywood... Perhaps it's because he runs a bar full of young punks that you wouldn't guess Cody is in his 40s. (He says he prefers to be contacted the old-fashioned way: “through Facebook.”) He's a product of a time when gay life took place in a bar, and in a strange way, Grindr resurrects a bit of that spirit, returning the online scene to the public sphere. "I've been club promoting for 20 years," Cody says. "I lost clientele with the advent of online dating because a lot less people go out to meet others at bars." But now, he says, Grindr "has brought gay life full circle." It's an app that complements—even enhances—a night of barhopping. This weekend, he's hosting a Grindr party where those with the app get into the club for free: 400 men, 0 feet away.

Obama to Democrats at last week's policy committeeconference, "You did all this despite facing enormous procedural obstacles that are unprecedented. You may have looked at these statistics. You had to cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and '60s combined. That's 20 years of obstruction packed into just one. But you didn't let it stop you."

From 2004: Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That's still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they'll survive and thrive in the long term.

The New York Times reports...that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that's given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds they've received in the past and use them to hire lobbyists and former Congressional staffers to advocate on behalf of receiving additional tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds in the future. Because the United States Senate is no longer a functioning democratic institution, they might get their way.