Author: shacker

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Realtors Are A Rip-Off

Slate: Why do you still need a realtor to buy a home? Why hasn’t the web done for real estate transactions what eBay has done for other exchanges? The 3-5% realtors get on both the buying and selling sides adds up to a huge chunk of change, given that the percentage hasn’t changed even as property values have shot up over the years. Agents – both buying and selling – earn tens of thousands of dollars in commission for a home sale, after putting in what generally amounts to a few days worth of work. And it’s not like realtors are magical specialists – it takes only 60 hours of training to get your realtor’s license, while it takes nearly 1,000 hours to become a hair stylist.

After all, escrow companies and home inspectors already do much of the heavy lifting in a real-estate transaction and add more value than most realtors while working for a flat fee.

In an industry with actual, healthy competition, realtor percentages would be a fraction of what they are, and would be commensurate with the amount of effort and skill put into the deal. But every effort to deflate the exaggerated traditional role of the realtor in the digital age is fought tooth and nail by the National Association of Realtors. Now the NAR is up against the DOJ for antitrust.

I’m not saying that realtors are crooks, or that there aren’t a million hidden landmines that realtors help innocent homebuyers to avoid. It’s a complex business and realtors provide an important service. But realty commissions need to enter the realm of fair competition. It’s time for the NAR to be taken down a peg.

Music: Squarepusher :: U.F.O.s Over Leytonstone
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Transportation Futuristics

helicopter_garageA flying saucer bus designed to reduce traffic congestion. An octagonal wheeled water craft invented by a Mexican lawyer. Underground airports. A monorail that looks like a giant Chevy Impala. A public escape pod for plummeting airplanes. 19th century pneumatic subways. Cruise ships with sails. Great collection of images at UC Berkeley library’s online museum of Transportation Futuristics.

Thanks David Huff.

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Snopes Bad for Convention Speeches

Zell Miller should learn to check snopes — or at least google — before busting a blood vessel in front of America. Turns out that a key chunk of his twisted, toxic speech at the RNC was lifted directly from a widely circulated chain email supposedly demonstrating Kerry’s record on defense spending, but soundly unraveled by snopes. I’m sure Miller’s explosive retort: “Get out of my face!” to Hardball’s Chris Matthews isn’t helping his image much.

Thanks Martini Republic.

Music: Miles Davis :: In a Silent Way
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Culture Jamming the RNC

A group of programmers, bicyclists, RSS junkies, multimedia gurus and bloggers called screensaversgroup are using mobile projectors on pickup trucks, WiFi, SMS, RSS feeds, and other real-time media to blast political counterweights onto the sides of buildings and sidewalks during the RNC. They’ve even developed their own KeyWorx software to gather, process, and collage incoming public opinion in real time.

The work they’re doing is non-destructive to physical property, but one of the Bikes Against Bush riders was arrested anyway, while giving an interview to a journalist.

Using a wireless Internet enabled bicycle outfitted with a custom-designed printing device, the Bikes Against Bush bicycle can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in water-soluble chalk.

Music: Edith Piaf :: Mon Dieu
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D-DOS Mafia

Got a business? Hate your competitors? Hire a mafioso gang of hackers to hammer your enemies’ web sites with distributed denial of service attacks. I’m thinking this would make a great theme for a future Sopranos episode. The younger family members could hang up the “garbage” business and jump feet first into the bloody underground world of packet sniffing. They could call it “Th3 50prawn05.”

Music: Tosca :: Annanas
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The Peppermint Gates of Fun Valley

gh-sailors  gh-peppermint  gh-granny

Not only is 1964’s Little Golden Book The Good Humor Man a great example of early product placement (masquerading as a treatise on the delights of suburban life in the summertime, there’s hardly a page that doesn’t sing the praises of licking Good Humor brand ice cream), it’s also riddled with vague and not-so-vague homoerotic references (see images). At least they seem that way to us, seen through modern eyes conditioned by media to scan constantly for veiled references. We could be wrong – it could all be completely innocent, the naive voice of an older writer creating a children’s book in the early 60s. Regardless, the book is a gas. Miles, of course, is blissfully unaware of the undertones – he’s more concerned that Bobby left his boats to go get ice cream, and the fact that the bunny rabbits hanging out by the fence didn’t get a lick.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Drinking Wine Spodyody
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Induce This

If passed, the Induce Act would make it possible to sue anyone who makes a device that can arguably be used to “induce” a consumer to infringe copyright. That, by many people’s reckoning, would apply to DVD burners, iPods, copy machines, word processors, and even the pencil.

Ernest Miller points to a mock lawsuit (fake Apple complaint) drafted by EFF attorneys to show what a case against the iPod might look like under the Induce Act.

Before the introduction of portable digital music players, the value of the music files derived from infringing sources was limited by the fact that computer users generally had to be sitting at their computers in order to play and enjoy them. Defendant Apple knew this and hence made the calculated decision to intentionally induce and enhance the attractiveness of infringement by providing these infringers with a device to enhance the rewards of their illegal labors – the iPod.

Good discussion following Miller’s post. But Brad Hutchings note that the RIAA has actually endorsed Apple’s FairPlay DRM model is beside the point — open this door and The Man gets an opportunity to block any manner of innovative technology equally capable of respecting or breaking the law (the crowbar and spraypaint also come to mind as examples of technologies that have both legal and illegal applications).

Thanks mneptok.

Music: Black Sabbath :: Electric Funeral
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Replacement Jaw Grown in Man’s Back

From CNN:

A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years — a bratwurst sandwich — after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an “ambitious” experiment.

The guy lost a jaw and half his tongue to cancer, didn’t eat a solid meal for nine years, had a new jaw grown in his own back, and can now eat steak! But he complains to his doctor that since he has no teeth, he has to cut the steak into such tiny pieces that it gets cold before he’s finished. Now that’s what I call grateful!

Music: Scarab :: Fall of the Towers of Convention
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nonfictionphoto

Birdhouse hosting welcomes nonfictionphoto.com — absolutely stunning images by recent J-School graduate Scott Squire. His photographs of street kids in Bucharest, Romanian orphanages, Cairo cafe culture, and portraits of life along the Nile river nail the gap between fine art and hard photojournalism. Amy and I recently purchased a print of one of Scott’s images from the Cairo cafe series – will be hanging in our living room soon. Welcome, Scott.

Update: Scott was at the Republican National Convention, photographing both the protest scene and images from the convention floor. He’s added images from the RNC to the site.

Music: Erik Truffaz :: Bending New Corners
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phpScheduleIt

At the J-School, we loan out tons of equipment to students and faculty – still and video cameras, projectors, laptops, minidisc recorders, microphones, etc. We’ve long struggled to find ways to keep track of everything, and to prevent items and rooms from being double-booked. There are a bunch of commercial apps out there (like ye olde Meeting Maker) designed for resource scheduling, but they’re expensive, and we’re dealing with a deep UC budget crunch.

Last week I went looking for open source solutions – just knew there had to be a free equivalent of Meeting Maker out there. Found and tried several, but settled on phpScheduleIt. We’re blown away. This app is of such high quality – cleanly designed, object-oriented, manages unlimited numbers of schedules (so we can have one for multimedia skills students, one for the radio program, one for faculty, one for booking classrooms, etc.), fine-grained permissions system… And because it’s written in PHP, I’ve been able to hack out a few features that didn’t suit our needs. Slowly but surely, I’m going to automate myself out of a job (yeah, right).

Students are back in full force and we’ve hit the ground running — yet another summer passes without touching 95% of my to-do list.

Music: The Pogues :: 5 Green Queens And Jean