onfocus

Great talk from Clay Shirky that tells some of the history behind SOPA and why it's dangerous. "They [media companies] want us all back on the couch: just consume."

"Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets."

Good description of a handy tool that helps test mail server settings.

The annual state of the world.

More thoughts on the UC Davis pepper spray incident and police militarization in general from a Davis faculty member. [via megnut]

"If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines." Hard to believe this happened in Berkeley of all places. By Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate. [via sacca]

"I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery." Me too. Quantity of traffic beats quality in many people's minds so I'm not optimistic.

Nice demo. I'm not sure I buy it yet. You still have to download the entire font to use a single icon. If you're using a large number of icons it might make sense.

Hello Brightness shortcut icon! This is great.

"Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students." A UC Davis professor is asking the chancellor to resign after the OWS pepper spraying incident.

"And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more." Linked everywhere for good reason--this is an excellent take on the occupy wall street movement.

Chart: the top 1 percent has been doing ok for themselves for the past few years.

Hollywood should not control DNS. I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody." It's nice to hear someone communicating traditional Democratic values so clearly.

"...today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." Nice.

Ben discusses Moore's law, Internet = Modernity, and changing expectations. I love the "translator" metaphor to describe our generation that has lived in both Internet and non-Internet worlds.

Ajax spinning image with no image! (A bit heavier than an image, though.)

"...it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to 'save' us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible." Anil connects the dots.

UGH. "AT&T's killing their $10/1,000 text plan. Now, you'll have to choose between $20 for unlimited, or forgo a plan and pay $0.20 per message. AT&T calls this 'streamlining.' We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam."

Mat Honan quoting Mike Monteiro: "We used to design things to take us to the moon, now we design things to keep us from getting out of bed." Like!

Nice toolkit of design elements for building websites.

Interesting look at "password padding" to create memorable AND secure passwords. [via Ask MeFi]

"We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future." Painful post to read but it makes sense. Now what?

"When people say there are no easy solutions to our problems, I don’t think they are thinking hard or creatively enough. If our problem is that we don’t have enough technically trained Americans, why are we not focused like lasers on educating people?"

"The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world."

Nice JavaScript dialog/alert system.

"What are Facebook and Google but giant institutions, arms of the new establishment? What are smartphones if not high-tech leashes? Today, online databases hold more information about us than could fit on a mile-high stack of punch cards. Some kind of rebellion seems in order." [via sippey]