Author: Josh Witten

http://www.thefinchandpea.com

Trollslaying, digital style

English: Logo of the Electronic Frontier Found...
English: Logo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pursuing an interesting strategy to protect podcasting from patent troll, Personal Audio. Hopefully the newest targets of lawsuits, CBS and NBC, will use their considerably legal firepower to crush the troll instead of settling. That does not necessarily help smaller organizations or individuals. The EFF is starting a campaign to identify “prior art” that will invalidate Personal Audio’s patents for all time.

*Hat tip to Marc Maron. You should watch his new TV show on IFC.

Unfollow

20130530-105056.jpgTwitter has a reputation for occasionally “unfollowing” people for you without your permission. I don’t know if this is true. Maybe I don’t keep close enough tabs on my “followed” list. I do know that it this “bug” (or the rumor of it) is a brilliant feature.

It gives us an out in the awkward social situation when we called out for unfollowing someone. We can blame it on Twitter. Twitter don’t care.

Personally, I think the phenomenon exists. The best way to get the social dynamic established is to have an actual “bug” in the system. I just don’t think it is a mistake.

The Desert of Lost Shells

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Photo Credit: Josh Witten (CC BY-NC-SA)

With apologies to Howard Andrew Jones; but I am at the beach and could not resist.

Anatomy of a Failed Joke

Well, I thought it was funny.

Anatomy

Get it? Yahoo thinks remote workers are inefficient, but just spent $1.1 billion on a blogging site whose content is entirely generated by remote users.

On the up side, the odds that I will have to continue feeling guilty for not using my Tumblr site are pretty low.

*I also made a joke about the Battle of Zama and Scipio Africanus based on a BoingBoing HOWTO post. That one went about as well as expected.

Bronze

photo (8)Today is my 8th wedding anniversary (bronze, apparently), which was kind of like getting IRB approval for the human genetics experiment my wife and I are conducting (n=2).

Congratulate me. Pity my wife. Always remember:

It’s better to be lucky than good-for small values of N.