Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.
But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.
In the Marvel movie universe, a straight white guy has played some part in saving the world 20 times in the past nine years. With The Amazing Spiderman 2 opening today, we’re up to 21. On the pages of Marvel’s comic books though, a different story is unfolding.
The company has, in the last few months, been aggressive in giving women and minority superheroes starring roles. That means solo books for heroes like Captain Marvel, She-Hulk, and Black Widow; the launch and re-imagining of the Ms. Marvel as a teenage Muslim-American girl; an all-female X-Men title; a new solo series for Storm; and perhaps most excitingly, the formation of The Ultimates, a superhero team comprised of women and minorities.
Reason Number 23 Why DC’s PR Sucks*: The publisher has been leagues ahead of Marvel in terms of female-led books (and, arguably, books with non-white-straight-leads…? I’m less sure about that one, to be honest, although it feels right) for years, and yet Marvel’s canny PR team is able to score headlines and stories like this one in Vox when it finally gets around to parity, making it seem like the leader in the area.
(* Reasons Number 1 Through 22 are pretty much the ones you think they are.)
Recently Pandora CEO admitted that Pandora have stopped paying performers royalties on their pre-1972 recordings. (BTW this is a guy who received $29,000,000 in executive compensation last year.)
Sirius apparently never paid artists on pre-1972 recordings. So it’s unlikely they have ever paid these performers either. How is this fair? How does this happen in this country in this day and age? How do these companies get away with this?
Well both of these multi-billion dollar public listed companies have taken a novel legal approach to pre-1972 recordings. Because pre-1972 recordings are covered by a patchwork of state rather than federal copyright law (or at least that’s Pandora’s and Sirius’s interpretation) these two companies claim they don’t have to pay performers royalties on these recordings. Understand–it’s not that these recordings are not protected at all, it’s that federal copyright protection for sound recordings started on February 15, 1972 and the performance royalty is in the federal Copyright Act. There is nothing in the Copyright Act that excludes pre-72 recordings.
Breaking a work-imposed Tumblr silence (Blame the deadlines, sorry) to post this because seriously what the fuck.
He speculates that since bedding from stranger mice produces the effect, what causes the stress is the thought of imminent territorial aggression from males in general, rather than the threat of predation from human males specifically. “What they’re afraid of is strange male mice,” he explains. “It’s just that other male mammals, including us, smell like male mice.”
Mogil’s theory might also explain why the presence of female researchers and olfactory stimuli defuse the effect of stress-induced analgesia: If the mice smell a mixed-sexed group, the “strange” male mouse is likely to be within a group or with its family, and much less likely to be aggressive or defending territory. The scientist has received a grant to observe whether the same effect is true for people. He believes that it will be, however, since the stress disappears once the animal convinces itself there’s no actual danger, “humans would be able to do that fairly quickly"—and any observable stress response would likely be much smaller and shorter-lived.
Are male scientists screwing up research because of their gender?
In related news, male everything-elses may also be screwing things up because of their gender, but not because of their scent.
I’ve been following, and loving, the response to this post for many reasons, not least of which is the wide variety of different responses and readings to the same text. It’s not necessarily been the critical analysis I was looking for because of the nature of Tumblr and the Internet in general, but it’s been fascinating in many of the same ways nonetheless. Yay for the Internet, even with the occasional vehemence/hyperbole/tendency towards binary constructs that it engenders.
Lowe said the delivery for the “ASM” title will be different – “on May 4, we’re going to drop four issues at once,” with another four issues coming about a month later. The experiment “is like the ‘Oregon Trail,’” Lowe said, “but we don’t want people getting tuberculosis or anything.”
Marvel is splitting the difference between binge watching and tradition with its new digital release schedule. I’m not sure this will do anything but irritate both sides, though…?
You’ve heard of infotainment. We live in what I call the age of arguetainment.
In the age of arguetainment the most condescending, dismissive, antagonistic newscasters win. They are the ones who get the biggest ratings. It’s like 20 years ago our news programs were taken over by the World Wrestling Federation.
And similar to the World Wrestling Federation we too often forget it’s not real. It’s just a paid performance. News today is like a reality TV parody of itself. Frankly, I can’t believe no one has come out yet with a reality TV show to pick our next most blustery newscaster. Though I’m sure it’s on its way.
These shows do a fabulous job at getting us worked up but they don’t generally help us build the deep understanding necessary to deal with our very important and complex challenges. And the internet magnifies this 1000 times.
From here.
I always have to be strategic about what I post on my personal platforms and how it relates to my job. My job is to be this character on social media — and I have to adhere to that. I do censor myself a lot in terms of opinions on things, because I know my opinions can be misconstrued or taken out of context, and I’d never want to put the brand in jeopardy because of a misguided tweet.
Life on the Modern Internet, from this interview with Marvel’s Adri Cowan.
A Chinese crackdown on pornography is taking a creative turn. Authorities have arrested over 20 women in Henan province for writing gay erotic fan fiction online, according to a report (video in Chinese) from Anhui Television… Since the launch of a “cleaning the web” campaign, the government has shuttered dozens of websites containing porn, as well as those dedicated to danmei. The reasoning, according to one police officer interviewed by Anhui Television, is the belief that slash fiction “is essentially pornography that promotes homosexuality.”