The Harry Potter ebooks aren’t going to have any DRM. From a gigaom article:

But by far the biggest break with tradition for Pottermore is that all the books will be sold without DRM restrictions…the Potter books will be personalized or watermarked.”

Am I the only who thinks a custom watermark with a buyer name or graphic would be pretty cool? Upsell opportunity. Essentially, buyers pay to “DRM” their own copy.

[gigaom]

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From the JSON license:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Seriously?

From getyourcensoron.com.

I understand why the entertainment industry thinks SOPA a good idea. They are retarded.

From the Washington Post, this might be my favorite quote about the discussions in Congress:

If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing markup used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”

And we give these asshats control over money and bombs.

Lovely.

Q: What else influences people?

A: Names. A while back, someone who operated a healthy cafeteria called to say, “No one is eating in our cafeteria. What should we do?” So we simply changed the names of the foods they served.

Instead of Italian Pasta, we called it Succulent Tuscany Pasta. Or instead of Chocolate Cake, we called it Belgian Black Forest Cake, even though the Black Forest isn’t in Belgium. Once we added a descriptive name, sales jumped by 27 percent. And it’s not just that food. People rated the restaurant better and the chef more competent.

If you believe that something’s going to taste good, you look for the qualities that confirm that. If you believe the milk is spoiled, you drink the milk looking for confirmation of that, too.

Proof that GIMP needs to change its name already, even if it is an acronym.

From How external cues make us overeat

Update: Some folks have questioned why I used a food-related article as my argument for Gimp needing a new name. The research is not food specific. People don’t make decisions solely on quality. The brain starts making decisions whether or not to like something before we are even consciously aware of it. The value of a product and service is determined by more than whether or not it serves its purpose well. So before you or I can introduce how awesome GIMP is to someone who has never used it, we are already fighting an uphill battle. And this is supposed to be good? Nothing like a project to handicap itself from the start.