Apologies from the Ministry of Information

"Dear citizen, we recently discovered a problem with an ebook that you have purchased, the photograph showing the Dear Leader shaking the hand of the former enemy president has been corrected to show the Dear Leader shaking the hand of our new friends. We apologize for the inconvenience." -- Ministry of Information, 2012

How long will it be before our digital content is "corrected" for our convenience, not just pulling books from our electronic readers in the middle of the night?

I bought a Kindle 2, but I returned it out of concerns my ebooks would not be my own books, in the way my paper books are my own books. I was concerned about what might happen to my hundreds of dollars of books stored on the Kindle if amazon went bankrupt. I worried that if the Kindle did not do well, they would shut down the DRM servers and my content would become inaccessible. So I sent it back (also it was a bit small screen and I wanted to loan it to my parents on occaison, who are elderly).

Today, I found in my Twitter stream an article in the New York Times: Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others.

I never imagined this would be the start of an Orwellian world where content of the books I own is edited at the whim of a publisher or perhaps the government whenever a judgement is rendered in a lawsuit or a contract changes, or perhaps is misread and accidentally violated. We now enter the world of my cold war childhood, when it was common for Pravda to scrub undesirable persons from a photograph or restore them once they were rehabilitated, to change history to suit political circumstance on a daily basis.

What will it be next from the Ministry of Information in the world of Big Publishing, "correcting" our photographs according to the latest lawsuit or government edict?

Save the Gulf Branch Nature Center

If you live in Arlington County, please help save Gulf Branch nature center by signing the petition available through Save Gulf Branch Nature Center.

The county is planning to demolish the nature center and leave a parking lot to save a pittance on the budget, totaling $132,057. Our county is blessed with numerous streams and stream valleys rich with wild plants and animals running through the urban landscape. In the 1600s this part of Virginia was described as the finest place in the world to live, with its numerous stream valleys and abundant wildlife set in rolling hills. It would be wrong to lose one of the few points of contact children have with nature. The nature center is an island for the preservation of native species. Moreover, the nature center, due to the proximity of human culture to nature, is an opportunity not found elsewhere to understand humans and their culture are not separate from nature, which could help dispel the destructive urge to recreate a mythic Eden.

I've lived here most of my life and was born in the district and came home to Alcova Heights where my family migrated to when Arlington was Alexandria County. I grew up spending my summers in Alcova Heights park. Doctor's Run, Four Mile Run, Lubber Run and the associated parks were my playground. Long Branch Nature Center was closer to my home, to my neighborhoods of Barcroft and Alcova, so I never visited Gulf Branch, being on the far side of Arlington for me, but through my experience with Long Branch at Carlyn Spring I understand why Gulf Branch should continue.

Is Hollywood the "Shadow Government?"

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885

Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already.

On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you.

I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. I've said before that we should consider avoiding recorded media, that society should return to entertaining itself by playing our music, singing, gathering to hear music played locally, similar to the local eating movement. The invention of the phonorecord, despite the positive of being able to preserve music, has done a great deal of damage to the existing music culture. In the 19th century most people were in a band, played piano, sang in a choir, perhaps many still do, but when I compare our culture and attitudes toward music to a society like Ireland or others relatively untouched by recorded music, there is much greater participation. Everyone sings or plays a musical instrument it seems, and it's not shameful for ordinary people to join in and sing even if they aren't up to "professional" standards, yet the same culture produces some of the best singers and musicians. Recorded music appears to have eroded the incentives to play and sing, and created disincentives to perform publicly, reduced the outlets and venues, turned performance into an industry, much like farming has been turned into an industry.

It is strange to hear music of any and all genre coming at you from random directions and sources. It's like food, with technology, there are no seasons. Hearing music without the musicians divorces it from its culture and locality. One car goes down the street thumping out rap, the next blaring Latin rhythms, a country song, rock, pop, jazz. Which is the real music? Which is the real feeling? I think this is something that recorded music has done, cut us adrift from musical culture, musical practice, musical community. When we can have any music at our fingertips, played back as a card board cutout of the original through speakers, its volume controlled by a knob, it is like food disconnected from the seasons, from growing, from cooking.