rc3.org

I don’t think I can eat meat that any more if I don’t know its source, and maybe you won’t be able to either after watching the video in this blog post. It’s hard to verbalize my anger and disgust after watching it, and the same sorts of things are happening all over the place.

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Lately when I’m watching older TV shows and movies, I’m struck by the number of plots that just wouldn’t work today due to the prevalence of mobile phones and smart phones. The inability of one person to get in touch with another was a key tool in the toolbox of fiction writers everywhere. You don’t [...]

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In light of the launch of EveryBlock and some hosting issues, Adrian Holovaty is shutting down chicagocrime.org and has posted his reflections on the site.

As he points out, it wasn’t the first mashup ever launched, but it was the first one that enabled me to see what was really possible when you combine data from [...]

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Mark Paschal at Six Apart has created a new Movable Type called Action Streams. The idea is that it compiles your activity on other sites into a single stream of data that you can use on your weblog as you wish. It’s an evolutionary advancement over other systems that provide similar functionality, but I think [...]

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Andrew Brown noticed that Pluck Site Life, a community software package for newspaper Web sites, handles obnoxious commenters in an unusual way: it enables moderators to put them in a ghetto where they see their own posts but nobody else can see them.

Here’s why it’s inhumane:

But in all these cases, the public punishment [...]

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Yahoo has established itself as an OpenID provider. This really is the year of OpenID’s full emergence. If you’re not accepting OpenID logins for comments on your blog, you probably should be.

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Mindset Media has created a profile of the typical Mac user. As a Mac user, the question isn’t whether you exhibit these qualities (of course you do), but which of your friends who aren’t yet using Macs are the best targets for conversion based on these criteria. Your eMusic-subscribing, Prius-driving, organically-farmed-broccoli-eating, microbrew-drinking, Kucinich-loving, crappy-Acer-laptop-using, know-it-all [...]

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Last year there was a huge squabble over the order in which various states would hold their primaries. A few state parties wanted to subject the unfortunate citizens of their states to more automated phone calls and other annoying forms of campaigning, so they moved up their primary dates. The national Democratic party penalized [...]

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As movie studios rely more and more on international markets to bring in revenue, movies are getting simpler and more universal. That explains what has struck me as the diminishing quality of major movie studio releases in recent years. I draw my general impression of what the studios are putting out by keeping track of [...]

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I’ve been trying to figure out what it really means to vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Their differences are much more stylistic than substantive, or at least that’s how it seems to me. Republican voters have the advantage of being able to draw plenty of contrasts among the candidates on that side of [...]

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