okay nerds, it's time to go to war

Molly Wood: fighting the copyright police state (this actually reminds me a lot of what I've read about the Red Scare communist witch hunts of the Cold War era...)

China bidding on us high-speed rail projects

NO! [via Infrastructurist] China is one of the last places we should contract to do our trains - first off, their technology is decades behind Japan, Germany, France, and Spain and completely untested. When you start throwing random technologies together in untested configurations, especially tech that you didn't develop in-house, you always have problems - best case scenario you get the Acelas, worst case the TurboTrains. But more importantly, all of their technology and designs are ripped-off of foreign intellectual property. If we're gonna go on IP witch hunts over 'pirated' music, then we damn well better not hire a corporation/nation-state that's built its entire industry on IP-theft. Also? the Chinese trains aren't as photogenic... just sayin...

very well-articulated article about the future of journalism, newspapers, and the internet

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."
[via Daring Fireball]