OT rules pit middle class vs. working poor

Sheila, who's heading into blissful nuptials territory very soon, has an item noting you can comment till June 30 on proposed changes in federal overtime rules and asks: "Don't you love mandates that simultaneously help the poor and hurt the middle class?" Now, if we only threw in some tax cuts for the rich, maybe we'd have something here.

Info with a ball and chain

Newsweek's tech-savvy Stephen Levy on Info With a Ball and Chain. Stopping piracy and increasing privacy makes sense. But what will we lose by locking up our songs, movies, books, files and e-mails?

Familiar themes, but millions of readers still aren't familiar with the subject. The book I'm writing explores much of the same terrain.

Nominees for European Online Journalism Awards

Here are the nominees for 2003 European Online Journalism Awards.

More on camera phones and moblogging

A couple of days ago Steve Outing in E-Media Tidbits added to the discussion regarding smart phones and journalism:

... Check out the new service TextAmerica.com, which allows anyone to set up a "moblog" -- a photo weblog that gets populated with images by the simple act of snapping a photo-phone image and sending to a private e-mail address, where a process publishes it to your personal moblog page. Now imagine this technique set up for a newsroom photo blog, where reporters, photographers, and freelancers send in instant images for planning purposes. (Thanks to the blog PicturePhoning.com for the pointers that inspired these thoughts.) ...

Also, I missed the June 5 article in the Guardian UK: Moblogging - updating blogs with photos from camera phones - is really racing ahead. It highlights the site 20six.co.uk, which allows mobile phone users to post pictures and text to blogs.

I don't have a smart phone/camera phone either, but when I get some time I hope to join the moblog/fotoblog movement.

Orrin Hatch, software pirate?

Boy, do we journalists love this kind of stuff. Wired News:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.

But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.

The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website. ...

Kevin Kelly's cool stuff

Only recently came across Kevin Kelly's recommendations of cool stuff sent in by readers.

Thanks to Susan Mernit for the pointer by way of BoingBoing.

Isn't it nice when things work?

Check out this Honda Accord commercial (Flash6 required). According to Andrew Sullivan, no special effects were used. They actually set this thing up manually and filmed it hundreds of times before they got it exactly right.

Amazing.

Amusement of the Day

OpinionJournal: What market would Al Gore's "liberal network" serve? "We already have an alphabet soup of liberal networks: ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC," claims columnist James Taranto.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

GOP reports record 2nd-quarter profits

The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DCóAt a stockholders meeting Monday, the Republican Party announced record profits for the second quarter of 2003, exceeding analysts' expectations by more than 20 cents per share. ...

The Onion on the FCC

The Onion: What do you think of the FCC's decision on media deregulation?