Once again the MPAA has released its box-office numbers for the year, and once again, this year has smashed all records (as has been the case throughout our young century ) ( really !). As always, the astronomical rise-and-rise of their fortunes is somehow used to launch a call for more publicly subsidized enforcement against “piracy.” (more…)
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Piracy dooms motion picture industry to yet another record-breaking box-office year
Radiooooo lets you pick a decade and a country, and will dispense popular music created then and there. (Note the “weird” option, disabled by default.) Thanks to this, I rediscovered Blue Boy’s Remember Me (UK, 1990s, fast, weird), which remixes Marlena Shaw’s Woman of the Ghetto into something very different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKKNPLowteY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMOGy3MXQSA
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Radiooooo: Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era
Like many other corporations, Airbnb and Uber use offshore shell companies to avoid taxes. The companies aren’t profitable yet, but they have set themselves up to avoid taxes once they become profitable. For years, pharmaceutical and tech companies including Pfizer, Merck, Google, and Apple have slashed their U.S. federal tax bills by using offshore tax havens and shifting profits abroad. Airbnb and Uber are starting to extend this strategy across vast new fields: PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that sharing-economy businesses generated $15 billion in revenue in 2014 and will take in $335 billion in 2025, growing largely at the expense of companies that pay billions in U.S. taxes. Bloomberg: The Sharing Economy Doesn’t Share the Wealth [ via ]
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Uber assigns "its IP to Bermuda, leaving less than 2% of its revenue taxable by the US"
A rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio turned up on a Scottish island, reports the BBC . Only 230 copies are known to exist, or thereabouts, and the last to be sold fetched £3.5m (about $5m) in 2003 and £2.8m in 2006. Countless fakes are knocking around, too. This copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, was found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Academics who authenticated the book called it a rare and significant find. … Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: “Like hell they have.” But when she inspected the three-volume book she found it was authentic. The folio represents the first legitimate compendium of Shakespeare’s work; we wouldn’t have much of Macbeth were it not for its publication, among many other works preserved in it.
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Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle
For April Fools, Google rearranged Gmail’s UI to replace the normal send button with one that attaches a Minions(TM) Mic Drop GIF animation to outgoing email . “Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Everyone will get your message, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won’t see it,” Google explained when it launched the button on April 1. Unfortunately, this resulted in things like this: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715752594551869440 Google quickly realized what it had done and turned it off… Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year.
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Google launches worst corporate April Fools joke ever, quickly takes it down
The numbers in this study are very back-of-the-envelope and assume a worst case: widespread adoption of Bitcoin and not much improvement in Bitcoin mining activity, along with long replacement cycles for older, less efficient mining rigs. Even the best case scenario has Bitcoin consuming a shocking amount of electricity. (more…)
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Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020
Reporters from Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post obtained a huge trove of email from Unaoil, a business run by a rich Monaco family, that reveal that the family ran a corrupt bribery empire that spanned the world’s oil-producing states, and that they world with companies like Rolls-Royce, Halliburton, Leighton Holding, Samsung and Hyundai, to rig contracts through a system of bribes and kickbacks that looted the national treasuries of some of the world’s poorest countries. (more…)
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Massive email leak reveals the worst bribery scandal in history
Michael from Muckrock writes, “Watch what you say: That next taxi you hail could be driven by New York’s Finest. A MuckRock FOIA request has found that the NYPD has at least three undercover cop cars posing as taxis … and quite possibly many more.” (more…)
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Cop Cabs: The NYPD has at least three fake taxis on NYC’s streets
The Cancer of Superstition , a non-fiction treatise commissioned from author H.P. Lovecraft, was found in a memorabilia collection in a defunct magic shop . Magician Harry Houdini asked Lovecraft to ghostwrite the text for a book project, but died shortly thereafter. Now it goes to auction. The collection bounced around after Beatrice Houdini’s death in 1943 and was never truly catalogued or ‘mined’ in all that time. The papers were never researched or inventoried,” said Potter & Potter president Gabe Fajuri. “In all that time, no one seemed to realise the significance of the manuscript.” Fajuri said the collection was recently bought privately, and when “the new owner began sorting through the mountain of paperwork, he began putting the pieces together, and in the process discovered the manuscript and its significance” From the excerpts, it sounds exactly as you’d imagine a Lovecraft text about superstition to sound (‘superstition is an “inborn inclination” that “persists only through mental indolence”’ etc). There is some debate over the authorship, with S.T. Joshi identifying CM Eddy. If you want it, expect to pay $25,000-$40,000 for it.
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Long-lost H.P. Lovecraft manuscrupt found
Matthew Garrett checked into a London hotel and discovered that the proprietors had decided that “light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets.” (more…)
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Hotel’s Android-based lightswitches are predictably, horribly insecure