Techwaves: Videogames : Cultural niche occupied by kin of 'World of Warcraft'

Writing in Prospect (Nov13,2k9), Tom Chatfield remarks regarding videogames (he has a canon of these and a discriminating taste among the vidgames on offer these days:

I believe that World of Warcraft matters. Exactly how and why it matters, though, can be hard to get at from the outside; much of what reaches the mainstream media is a muddle of scandals, statistics and pseudo-scientific scraps. So I’d like to take a few moments to recall just what it was like to play this game for the first time five years ago, in the company of an old friend who had managed to wheedle both of our ways onto the game’s American servers in time for launch—and why, five years on, the character I created then is still soldiering on through the northern reaches of the world’s most famous unreal destination. ...

Technotes, by Technowlb

The gulf between those who do and don’t know what playing a video game is like is now one of the most telling cultural fractures around; and it’s thanks in large part to WoW that it’s no longer clear which is the more dignified side to be standing on.

Cultural Niching -- Arts, Sports & Games by Neetcha Meetcha

To me, somehow philosopher-engineer Hendrik van Riessen's The Society of the Future was prognosticating vaguely, phenoms like today's videogaming digital culture.

Arts: Genius: New theory of Adolf Hitler's personality and self-image as genius

Spiegel Online International, carries an interview with art historian Birgit Schwarz regarding her research on "why Adolf Hitler saw himself as a genius and how his obsession with art affected his political views."

Arts
& Romantic Theories of Genius,
by Artichokes

The renown Protestant philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, also followed the 'genius' notion of European philosophy and letters that rose to become a cultural force thru-out the Romantic Era (cf. Vollenhoven on the concept of "zeitgeist" in the historiography of philosophy). Dooyeweerd's concept however is explicitly rooted in the idea of God's direct activity in giving the gift of creative genius to a mortal, whether he or she be Christian, Atheist, or adherent of another religion.

It seems that with D both a good genius and an evil genius, and much in between, are possible. Genius entails responsiblity. See: Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, II, last 10 pages.

Of course, Dooyeweerd opposed the National Socialist system of ideas (I believe D covers this zone also in volume II, NCTT, 1953-1957. When his job became officially defunct, the Free University (VU Amsterdam) where he was professor of law, being eventually closed down by the Nazi Occupation forces. Dooyeweerd lay low until the war was over, teaching secretly during the remaining war years a few graduate students weekly in his home.

Vollenhoven's zeitgeist parameter attempts to account for the macro-shifts in a culture whereby one "spirit of the age" gives way to the ascendancy and supersession of the oncoming spirit of the new age, however sour and dour, however exuberant and cheery. That so disparate a set of opposing views of life coud share a problem, its problematics, and come to vastly different trends of distinctive formulations, is structural but remaining distinctive in the process of Western philosophy. It's important to detail the pinpoint of similarity (in this case of comparison, the same zeitgeist carries along and renews/degenerates "creative genius" notions inherited from the Romantics) and the vast range of differences that pit the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea vs Hitler's National Socialism.

Toronto the Good: Transit costs for customers rise, no seniors discount?

 Yep,  if you're a Tortontonian or you're planning to come here to study, please be advised about public transportation under our Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), and the rise of 11% early in the New Year 2010.

Adult transit riders will need another quarter to ride the rocket starting Jan. 3.

Sic transit mundi, or some such.

Satire of Googlebooks by Mazurke, cartoon in Prospect {UK]

Hat Tip to cartoonist Mazurke and publisher Prospect {UK}

Segksetics: Stardumb: Levi Johnston shrugs wife and mother-in-law (repost)

"I just get naked. That's what I do."


But what about his kid, the 10 month old son in wife's care, him claiming he wants custody ... Levi's wife is Bristol Palin ...

Meanwhyld, the same Levi sets himself up as a h+pr+ce nude model who features for his photographers his own full-monty, mass-displayed in presumably a flacid-state in a forthcoming issue of the sex-picture mag, PlayGirl (just so his heterosegksuality is certified). US mag cawt up with the story and blasted a pleasant portrait of the shameless coxswain on its Celebrity News section (Oct26,2k9), plus the following text:

Get ready for more -- a lot more -- of Levi Johnston.
The hockey-playing dad to Sarah Palin's grandson, Johnston, 19, is ready for his Playgirl close-up. And while a date has yet to be set for his nude photo shoot, his manager Tank Jones told Usmagazine.com today, "it will be early November" in New York.

When did stars lose their virginity?
And Playgirl readers shouldn't expect many artfully placed pillows in the photos. Jones confirms to Us that full-frontal shots are planned for the shoot -- and that Bristol Palin's ex isn't nervous about exposing himself.

"He's pumped! He's ready to shock the world. The hell with fifteen minutes," Jones told Us over the phone. "As a matter of fact, when I picked him up, he came out the house naked. I said 'not now!'"

Johnston himself took the phone for a moment to chime in, telling Us: "I just get naked. That's what I do."

Hollywood sex scandals -- recap them here!
Like the up-in-the-air date, the theme of the shoot itself is also to-be-determined, Jones explained. "We're going to play it by ear. I'm going to make sure it's something he's comfortable with and tasteful. This is art."

And what of the New York Post's reports of a six-figure payday for the budding model? "This is not about money," Jones tells Us. "I don't remember how much it is. It's a little bread."
Johnston split with former fiance Bristol Palin, 19, in March 2009 -- two and a half months after the birth of their son, Tripp (now 10 months).

Check out the ugliest celeb splits
November will be a big month for Johnston's would-be mother-in-law:
Sarah Palin appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show Nov. 16 -- coinciding with the release of her autobiography,

Going Rogue: An American Life.

November  16 was yesterday, so I'll keep my eye on any TV news afterwords the book's release.

-- Politicarp

Sports: Basebal: National League picks best pitcher of season

San Fransisco's pitcher has won the National Baseball league's Cy Young award. The panel of judges of "the old school Baseball Writers Association of America" seems to have bawt into the position of fantasy baseball geeks:  "Wins are not the best judge of a pitcher's effectiveness."

Sports, by Sportikos

See USA Today's Steve Gardner's Fantasy Windup, an analysis of why Tim won against two worthy contenders, both Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright, both of the Saint Louis Cardinals.

Technics: Personal Computers: MicroSoft's dazzling "unified communications"

MicroSoft touts new unified communications:

One inbox. One interface.

Unified Communications technologies eliminates the separation between phones and computers. Email, voicemail, faxes, IM and calendar events all arrive in one place: the inbox. A single, familiar interface for PC, web or mobile devices makes it easy to use, no matter where you are. Suddenly, a video conference with real-time document sharing isn’t just possible – it’s less costly than collaboration by phone, not to mention taking a plane. When communication is faster and easier, productivity goes up and travel costs go down.

Technotes, by Technowlb

One unified communications platform

Microsoft Unified Communications solutions - Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - don’t just make your people productive, they make you efficient. You can improve productivity while reducing the costs of communication systems by up to 50%. Instead of dealing with separate communication silos, you’re managing an integrated email, phone and conference system with built in protections that help increase security, compliance and availability. Communications work well, are cost effective, and are easy to manage, all within a common Windows-based infrastructure.

This new technical product fascinates me. I'm way below the learning curve on these matters, but I sure can tell how it's different for me technically at present, and in the techno-fantasy horizon MS (that my budget doesn't allow me to acquire).

-- Technowlb

Aharon Etengoff writng on security, "Rickrolling worm infects jailbroken iPhones" (Nov8,2k9) TG Daily "The Tech Generation" intrigues me with unheard-before terms indigenous to the subculture of what used to be telephony, since become wireless telephony, now become smart-phonery, in process of becoming apps hub tech (on handheld devices, in large part).

A number of iPhones in Australia have reportedly been infected by a worm that replaces the background wallpaper (face of the handheld) with an image of 80's pop icon Rick Astley.

"The worm, which could have [already] spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH," explained Sophos security researcher Graham Cluley. "Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable and installs itself again."

Thus, the metaphor "jailbroken" adjectivally refers to an iPhone in a certain technical condidtion where owners have not changed the defaut password after installing [ssh, Secure Shell ].

Technotes, by Technowlb

"The worm will not affect users who have not jailbroken their iPhones or who have not installed SSH," said Cluley. "What's clear is that if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch, and installed SSH, then you must always change your root user password to something different than the default 'alpine.'"

Tech: Consumer/Corporate relations: Bell Telephone, Bell Express VU TV, Bell Internet

I am so disgusted with Bell Canada from which I receive three services -- Phone (Bell Telephone), TV (Bell Express Vu satellite service), and Internet (Bell Internet to which I have been forcibly shifted from the previous email arrangements I had under Sympatico.ca). The conplexity of using these Bell services and their products has risen exponentially, degrading their previous relative value in the new intrusive and clogging arrangements which are operated as they are, under the go--ahead by the Tory time-serving bureaucrats and technocrat economists of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Telephony is bundled within the group's mandate.

Also, I must deal with the outsourcing of direct service to a corporation callback centre in India. As a result, the phone help for the Internet service has fallen considerably, not least of all linguistically and in regard to cultural reference. This outsourcing saves Bell Canada money, reduces the quality of service to English-speaking consumers who use the Ontario idiom for this language, and leaves the Ontario customer permanently dissatisfied.

Furthermoere, I've been more or less required to shift over from Apple applications, especially Mail.app, to the disservices called MicroSoft and its hideous Hotmail, and as a satellite to the foregoing Bell's version of so-called Bell Mail, an online gerryrigging that at present takes me nowhere.

The CRTC, presently in the hands of the Conservative Party's minority federal govt of Stephen Harper, is corrupt in its treatment of Bell customers. To my mind, this cozy relation between govt /CRTC and Bell is to the hurt of consumers, especially ordinary users and seniors like myself who are abused severely by the over-complexity of all the Bell technical "services." This horrid setup is the combined answer of govt and the tech company/ies involved, to the needs of seniors cawt in the technological crunch that is haunting my generation.

Principium Consumers Hub

It seems to me it's time to revive rW's previous regular column on consumer goods and services, g & s that so often runs amok wreaking mayhem, against the modest requirements of lower-income pensioners of older years who are systematically toyed with by these privileged financial blood-sucking corporations like Bell, at the connivance of CRTC and the Harper Conservatives which placate the greed-corporations. I need the services, not least the the convenience of Bell's 1-bill for all the three main services (there are more, like cell phonage which I don't have and don't covet), these "services" and their products do not make up for the greed-driven overcomplicated racket that is Bell Canada in Ontario.

There's one competitor remaining in Toronto (that I know of): Rogers Cable TV, phone, and Internet service. That being a clone of Bell except for TV (Bell is satellite-based, Rogers is cable-based and I guess those cable are actually Bell fibre-optics lines, actually; so, I have no real competitive option. Likewise, the Conservatives have no real competition -- the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois are worse than the Tories, I presently think. The Conservs has the elderly ub a corner, and do not regulate Bell to make things technical plain, workable directly, and cheap.

Technotes, by Technowlb

No competition in case 1. No competition in case 2. So, again there's no remedy whereby an inner reformation of the CRTC m+t occur under Conserv provenance. And my increasingly tech- determined lifetime.

Toronto the Good: City reaches 'tentative deal' (not an actual contract) with outside workers, but not even that with insidees

Update: Toronto's striking inside and outside workers reached tentative agreements with the city Monday, deals that could end a lengthy garbage strike in Canada's largest city.

Officials with CUPE Local 79 and TCEU (CUPE) Local 416 have confirmed ratification votes will take place on Wednesday, said Toronto Mayor David Miller. Union officials said pickets would remain in place until the deals are approved. ["Toronto's striking workers reach tentative agreements, says CBC News.ca]

------------------

[Earlier today, I wrote and quoted as follows: The latest from the adversarial labour-relations that has stunk up Toronto, having left us to stew in our health-hazard city once again.

Allison Hanes, Canwest News Service (Jul 27,2k9) via canada.com, says:

An end may be close for Toronto's 36-day civic strike after the president of the union for striking outdoor workers announced early Monday morning that a tentative deal has been struck with the city. ...

However, Mark Ferguson, president of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 416, said the strike for 6,000 outdoor members will not end until a contract is reached for its sister union representing indoor workers.

He urged the city to "shift its focus" and get down to business with Local 79.

Toronto civic workers walked off the job on June 22.

One of the most noticeable disruptions caused by the strike has been the halting of garbage service. Mountains of garbage piled up all around the city with city dump sites being picketed by union workers.

Elsewhere in southern Ontario, the city of Windsor on Friday ended a 101-day strike of 1,800 unionized city workers, ratifying a four-year deal. Windsor had also had their garbage service suspended during the strike.

National Post
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Not all public employees shoud be permitted to strike, they shoud have special arbitration boards assigned to decide on issue of wages and benefits, but not on health and safety which is provided for at law outside the Labour Relations Act, in the Health and Safety Act.

Toronto the Good: Garbage stinkpot: "Union sets deadline for deal"

Toronto Star--largest daily-newspaper circulation in town, but always struggling to keep its eroding subscription circulation and its ad revenues up--carries an article, "Union sets deadline for deal" (Jul 24,2k9) by Donovan Vincent. Of course, if you've followed the Toronto the Good series on this rW Backpage, you're aware perhaps that, after working since January with no contract, city workers went on strike. The employees are in a legal-strike period, and are witholding their human labor in order to hike up wages and benefits.

In the Canadian nomenklatura of union establishments, there are two unions on strike. One, is CUPE Local 416, whose president is Mark Ferguson; the other is CUPE Local 79.

416 is "The union representing city of Toronto outside workers," and it "says a settlement in the five-week-old strike must be achieved by midnight Sunday or negotiations will be over."

416's ultimatum woud mean that our city's garbage-removers woud be removing their negotiators from the table, ceasing to meet faces-to-faces the team that negotiates for city management and, ultimately, for the mayor.

79 groups over 20,000 City of Toronto inside workers -- 11,600 full-time inside and 12,750 part-time.

This difference between working inside and outside is so relative, that it pales into something conceptually weak when compared with the differences among these very workers regarding life-philosophy, and sometimes work-philosophy. Why not let workers freely nominate such qualified representation as they want (freedom of assocation and representation), so that each kind of viewpoint among workers on union representation can vote for the union of one's choice.

The adversarial system of labor-relations has produced a stinking city (rat-infested, I'm sure). At the same time, warnings have been issued of diseases like Swine Flu and H1N1 becoming decidely chancier with the garbage build-up, undisposed of.

Adversary anti-pluralist union/employer conflict has resulted in 33 days of plague-encouraging desperation by the citizenry not parties to their side, or this way of settling issue of public employment, paid for by taxpayers who have to live in the filth and cantagion that the unions and city management are toying with. A shame on all!

Technics: Microsoft: The software manufacturer at last blinks in the glare of Europe's exam of its products there

In an ongoing battle with Europe's sales regulators, Microsoft has made a gesture toward internal relaxation of its self-established proprietary r+ts.

Microsoft proposed including a "ballot screen" that would make it easy for Windows 7 users to install a competing Web browser, set it as the default and disable Internet Explorer, the European Commission said in a statement. PC makers would also be able to install competing Web browsers and disable IE.

"The Commission welcomes this proposal, and will now investigate its practical effectiveness in terms of ensuring genuine consumer choice," it said.

This particular infobit (perhaps even factoid) has been revealed by James Niccolai of IDG News Service via PCWorld, "Microsoft offers choice of browsers to satisfy EU."

Technotes, by Technowlb

If Microsoft (MS) makes a serious accomodation to the European market for personal computers, the consumers of said market who woud want MS Windows operating system/s but don't want to take on any version of the failed browser series Internet Explorer (a browser-bias that Microsoft has traditionally imposed), it woud seem a major precedent is about to be set that coud result in backflare demand for the same freedom of choice among MS products in the USA.

Retrospect: Obit: Michael Jackson, RIP

Who stole the soul of the boy from Indiana?

Michael Jackson has gone from boy wonder to circus freak in his 40-year career, with stints en route as 'king of pop', messiah figure and public enemy. How did it happen, and can we expect yet another incarnation when he takes to the stage in London for his comeback concerts next month? Peter Conrad revisits the life and times of pop's Peter Pan (The Observer, Jun14,2k9).

rW has chosen to point to an evaluation of Michael's life and career, on the eve of his planned appearance in London UK, before the artist's death. The circumstances surrounding the death are presently being investigated.

In the mercies and grace of God, may the aging star now Rest in Peace.

Toronto the Good: Toronto the Fair: Oh, the stink of the garbage, City garbage workers on strike

CTV.ca reports on the deplorable strike that is backing up garbage everywhere in Toronto at present. Maybe the strike is valid, but I doubt it. Nevertheless, the law (based on the adversary system of industrial relations, a holdover from the bad old days) almost requires these periodic strikes, in this case especially because the workers have gone without a contract of any kind for some months. Bad practice by the city, to which the union has responded by waiting for the heat of the summer when the immediate consequences of backed-up garbage affects not just residents alone, but visitors and tourists too.

Some city residents angry over how the city has made Christie Pits park a temporary dumping ground say they've obtained a document that shows the city will be expanding such dumps elsewhere.

Govind Rao of the Friends of Christie Pits told ctvtoronto.ca on Monday that his group sent an inquiry about what chemicals are being used to control insects and vermin at the temporary dump sites, one of which is in a hockey rink at Christie Pits, which is north of Bloor Street West and west of Christie Street.

The response came from the pest control company. "In their response, by mistake, they sent us ... a list of all the different dumpsites," he said.

It's time for the province of Ontario which controls labour relations, to dispose of the obsolescent adversary worldview in industrial relations. The province should pluralize the government-related unions, and put the Christian Labour Association of Canada on the secret ballot for garbage workers to elect representation based on labour-relations values (workview), elect representation proportionately from all the union centrals the variously-minded workers choose.

Further Research:

Will strike save city money?

Entertainment: TV: Gossip news targetting celebrities had source in hospital where Michael Jackson died

Television scooped the Jackson-decease story, beating the actual pronouncing of the death by the officiating medical doctor/s. A n+tly gossip TV program apparently had a 6-minute lead, and when TMZ.com went public with its obit announcement, their report dominated the the rest of TV, the newswire services, and the print media. (In the USA, at least.)TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. So hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of Michael Jackson's death last week, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer actually died.

For its many critics this was confirmation that the website, which, amid endless surveillance videos of minor celebs parking their cars and walking to their front doors, brought you exclusives on Mel Gibson's antisemitic ravings at a traffic cop, Alec Baldwin's brutal mobile phone rant at his 11-year-old daughter and the contents of Anna Nicole Smith's bedside table the night she died (Slim Fast and chewing gum), plays fast and loose with the truth.

But for TMZ, the explanation was simple. By the time Jackson was officially declared dead, at 2.26pm Los Angeles time last Thursday, one of the site's sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre (it has a vast network that blankets the city) had already tipped it off.

Michael Jackson dead was the scoop of a lifetime for any media outlet, and the apogee of the four-year-old celebrity-obsessed site that boasts its snippets are "even more fascinating than the hype". In that time, TMZ (the name stands for thirty-mile zone, the area of central LA thickly populated with stars), which is as voyeristic as it is speedy, has become one of the world's most quoted sources of entertainment news, with rival sites, TV channels and traditional gossip columns, such as the New York Post's infamous Page Six, quoting it regularly./blockquote>Many folks are taking the singer / dancer's death hard.

Jackson's death finalizes his appetite for scandal. May he rest in peace. The surveys and evaluations of his contribution to American pop music, the rise of music videos, and the history of scandal in Hollywood will continue for a long time, as the population shakes his iconic function from its appreciation.

Celebrations: Gay Pride Day: Display of power by a minority still scared by memories of painful past treatment

Today is "Gay Pride Day." I'm homo but don't include myself within the Gay movement, nor do I use its dubious term to identify myself. After all, Christopher Isherwood said, so many decades ago, that ascribing to oneself the ascription "Gay" makes us all sound like "Bliss ninnies."

Internet: Semantics: 'ReadWriteWeb' explains semantic tagging service

Semantic Tagging Service Zigtag (Finally!) Launches

by Sarah Perez (ReadWriteWeb,Dec29,2k8)

It was two years ago that we first heard of Zigtag, a service that promised to "transform how people search, save and share knowledge & information." Now, after a nine-month private beta, this semantic tagging service has finally launched. But is Zigtag's bookmarking tool intelligent enough for 2009?

About Zigtag

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Technotes, by Technowlb

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

This blog has experimented with numerous tagging schemes, but always on the fly and without a full review of past schemes, which m+t have harvested more consistency. The idea of Zigtag, however, comes into its own around a given community of users within the general community of Zigtaggers, the more narrow community able to stabilize protocols and usages, even using an in-group's jargon, technical terms, and coinages--NuSpels, if you cawt the kind uv thing I have in mind.

Technics: MicroSoft's concession to Interoperability and its failure to provide in IE8

<>span style="font-weight:bold;">PressPass interviewed MS's Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Division, MicroSoft Corporation. "New Microsoft Interoperability Principles Ensure Open Connections and Promote Data Portability" Feb21,2k8.

Q&A: Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Division, discusses Microsoft’s new interoperability principles and the steps the company is taking to increase the openness of its products.

Asking the questions (only the first Q of the interview is included here) PressPass: Can you start by providing a high-level overview of today’s announcement?

Technotes, by Technowlb

Muglia: Sure. The announcement covers broad and important changes to our technology and business practices designed to increase the openness of our high-volume products to make it easier to develop highly-interoperable information systems. The changes are embodied in

Four interoperability principles to which we have committed [ourselves as a corporation].

First, to provide an open connection to our high-volume enterprise products;

second, promote data portability;

third, continue to enhance our support for industry standards;

and finally, to create more opportunities to strengthen dialogue and engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

Together, these principles significantly change the way we share information about our technologies and products. These changes help increase choice and opportunity for developers, partners, customers and competitors, which is one of our top long-term goals.

In this general context, IE Blog offers an extremely engaging article on IE Interoperability. Discussing "Quirks mode" and "Stamdards mode, this source offers a pithhy remark worthy of reflection: "Each version of each browser has its own Standards mode, because each version of each browser improves on its web standards support. There’s Safari 3’s Standards mode, Firefox 2’s Standards mode, IE6’s Standards mode, and IE7’s Standards mode, and they’re all different. We want to make IE8’s Standards mode much, much better than IE7’s Standards mode."

I finally found the actual webpage for MicroSoft's Interoperability Principles: Interoperability Principles -- Open Connections, Standards Support, Data Portability Published: February 21, 2008 | Updated: February 21, 2008a>.

Arts Profile: Music: Singer/rapper/poet who makes an artform of cursing and 'talkin' dirty' ...

A protégé of Dr. Dre, rapper Eminem emerged in 1999 as one of the most controversial rappers to ever grace the genre. Using his biting wit and incredible skills to vent on everything from his unhappy childhood to his contempt for the mainstream media, his success became the biggest crossover success the genre had seen since Dre's solo debut seven years earlier. The controversy over his lyrics was the best publicity any musician could afford, and being the first Caucasian rapper to make a significant impact in years may have given him a platform not afforded to equally talented African-American rappers. A gifted producer as well, his talents always seemed overshadowed by his media presence, which was a mix between misunderstood genius and misogynistic homophobe. Both may be true, but his message spoke to legions of disaffected youth who had few role models in the rap world who could relate to the white lower-class experience.

Pop Music, by Earfix

He was born Marshall Mathers in St. Joseph, Missouri, USA

Read More of this splendid bio at Amazon MP3 ("music downloads for any device"), plus a complete discography of E's recorded albums, and an online marketplace with shopping cart for purchase of his MP3 Amazon releases, no doubt a lead for attracting buyers to the new Amazon website that's directly in competition with Apple's iTunes -- my past first choice for buying music downloads hitherto. Here on Amazon MP3, Eminem is a 'spotl+t artist for May' and he's #4 on the list of "25 artists to watch in May," says the Amazon MP3 merchandising text, the whole page indeed and many linked to it on this website in the season of its initial marketing.

Did I buy, you ask, a US$8.99-priced version of E's recently-released new hip-hop curse-fest, Release? -- No, but I did go for the cheapest version, that option being one of three; my cheapo option I later noticed (in a post-purchase insite) was the only one not labelled "Explicit" (these two versions or purchase-portals cost a buck more ... so, I began to wonder whether my version is full of blips or instead of that something like, let's say, sound-emptied dead moments, excisions, but even without such distortions to cover up or erase out precisely the over-the-line words of Eminem's vocabulary and metaphory, I ask, can you actually achieve a mature appreciation/critque without experiencing explicitly the way (and with the words he chose in performance and recording, all the words before the blips or cuts removed them, those words...)--can you attain as good an aesthetic experience of what Eminem has to offer?, his art such as it be.

But I should not shy away from my inability to make an online purchase of Release due to the fact as I belatedly noticed--only USA residents can buy online at Amazon MP3. Hrrrumpppffft!

Principium Consumers Hub

On purchase matters, you (residents in the USA) can buy individual songs and slowly collect the songs of the tracks of a given album, single by single, if you want. Just to give you a picture of how Amazon MP3 is competing with iTunes.

Technotes, by Technowlb

Sports: Soccer: Chicago Fire trashes Toronto Football Club

. "Toronto FC midfielder Amado Guevara and Chicago Fire midfielder Mike Banner battle for the ball during the second half in Toronto on Saturday. (Pix: Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)." Paul Attfield in Globe & Mail