joe, beta

This event didn't involve phsyically harming the bull, but the 40 people who were injured might think twice before they fund a sport comprised of teasing and torturing animals.

This subject deserves no cultural sensitivity: bullfighting is barbaric and those injured during such events would do well to reconsider their sense of sport.

What do you expect an animal, surrounded by hundreds of loud people, with no clear route of escape, to do? While this was just a study in "acrobatic" avoidance of the angry animal, there is no sympathy in my heart for people injured or killed during real bullfights.

In our gleeful urge to dominate wild animals, humanity is often blind to the reality that such dominance is rarely permanent, but is instead borrowed.
Those surprised when a trapped, tormented, and tortured bull hauls off on a rampage and attacks as many people as possible are completely insane, and total morons.

Another video, shot by a spectator, here.

Sources: Al Jazeera; New York Times

Old JOE ROSS, of Montgomery, Hamilton County, had all his horses taken by MORGAN. JOE is a Butternut. It is said he swore so hard that the atmosphere was blue around his locality.

A "butternut" is a confederate sympathizer or soldier, I believe. [Wikipedia]

That Morgan, what a bastard. We may never know if he was apprehended after his Ohio-based crimes, but the year 1863 was never the same.

Tensions between butternuts and Union folk must have been running high that year, with Lincoln having signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January. [Wikipedia]

Source: New York Times

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a joint statement that they would hold meetings in June to examine how the Communications Act meets the current needs of consumers, the telecommunications industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

Let me preface this by saying that I feel like I have a good basic grasp of the issues at play here, but I'm wide open to correction if I'm confused about something.

I posted in April about how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC in a case where the regulatory agency had sanctioned Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Since then, there has been talk at the FCC of partially reclassifying broadband internet (PDF) to apply provisions of different sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Why the change? Well, among other things, it would grant the FCC the authority to impose, as Ars Technica puts it, "a stripped-down version of common carrier nondiscrimination rules" -- and would allow sanctions like the ones struck down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to stand.

If the Congressional revisions to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 manage to move forward, those changes would, if passed, trump and likely circumscribe anything the FCC attempts to implement in the way of reclassification efforts. That, in my mind, seems to send a signal from the legislators to the FCC, suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski consider leaving this one to the legislature before investing too much time and energy in making regulatory changes that may be undercut by the revisions to the law.

Just as the 1996 revision updated the original 1934 telecommunications legislation to let telephone companies, over-the-air broadcasters, and cable companies all play in each others' sandboxes, any changes to the 1996 version would focus on the availability, administration, and pricing of high-speed broadband internet access relative to the regulatory framework already imposed on older technologies.

First, of course, they would have to add in the words "broadband" and "internet" -- which don't even appear in the act as it was passed in 1996. That means we're not looking at a timeline of weeks or even months, but maybe years.

But hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations. Slacker Radio, a competitor with three times as many songs but less than a third of Pandora’s listeners, takes a different approach. A ’90s alternative station should be informed by Seattle grunge, said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president for marketing at Slacker. “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”

The New York Times story offers a good history of Pandora. Definitely worth a read.

The streaming music concept is not new, but the ubiquity of web-connected mobile devices has given the companies that provide streaming music an opportunity to vie for the number one spot in a niche market that will only continue grow as the 21st century progresses.

As I have probably said on this site before, I'm a longtime Pandora user and I often enjoy the results of their music genome analysis The Music Genome Project catalogs the myriad traits shared by various songs and artists, like pop sensibility, piano as the main instrument, and male singer (one result here would be Ben Folds), and finds songs and artists that share the traits of the song or artist you first searched for to create your station.

The song choices Pandora serves up are usually somewhat more homogeneous than those of competitors, but that is why I use Pandora: when I want to be confident that the kind of music they are giving me is just the kind of music I want to hear. For example, when I'm studying I'll take Pandora over competitors for the consistency. Predictability has its place in my listening preferences.

Sometimes.

Other times, I use my new Slacker Radio account. Slacker offers a human element. Although you can create stations from artists you search for, Slacker employs human DJs to develop both pre-made playlists and how the playlist looks when you make your own station. This promises a more traditional listening experience and has its own unique sort of consistency.

Slacker also lets you fine-tune how "out of the box" your station will be, by allowing you to ask it for more popular or more fringe choices. This makes it a better way, in my opinion, to discover music you really like but may not have otherwise learned about. Their menu of pre-made stations is also handy, serving up the standard genres and even a station for the "popular hits" of the current era.

The good thing is that both services offer an app for webOS, so I use both on my Palm Pre almost daily.

Try Pandora...

http://pandora.com

...and Slacker Radio:

http://slacker.com

After a day of silence, the Foreign Ministry said that China welcomed foreign Internet companies but that those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” Speaking at a scheduled news conference, Jiang Yu, a ministry spokeswoman, did not address Google’s complaints about censorship and cyberattacks and simply stated that “China’s Internet is open.”

Saying that China's internet is open seems akin to saying that Las Vegas' casinos are closed.