Front Row: And What About the Straws?
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A designer creates a dress made entirely of used juice pouches for a concert pianist to wear while performing.
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Tycho:  After Gods & Heroes was scrapped, developer Perpetual Entertainment was sued by their PR company.  People are being sued all the time, and we should know, but in this case they were being sued for really interesting things: namely, a kind of "bounty" on initial sales based on their tireless promotion of the title.  Is that common in these arrangements?  I don't think most people consider that role especially powerful, but companies don't write in clauses like that for no reason.  The articles you see on news sites are written by people you know, but the content, timing, and (if they can swing it) tone of those articles is typically part of a fairly scientific structure cooked up by PR.  They contextualize the demos in their entirety, negotiate access, and stud their speech with tactical phrases they hope will find their way into the final piece.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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Just a couple of hours to go and it will be clear which movie is getting the Oscar for best film. I was wondering whether Google Trends will have any predictive value and did 3 Trend searches. Release dates and other factors haven&#8217;t been taken into consideration and the whole exercise is in no way scientific, just [...]
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Those talking heads on TV may be profiting by front-running.
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Tycho:   It has become the Saturday tradition to do the next strip upon the expo's stark and terrifying stage, but since Armadeaddon needed its proper epilogue it got moved out to Wednesday.  Gabe was highly indulgent of audience suggestions in the final version, far more than he is to me, adding many, many things based on them being called out from the microphone - he has a version with more additions still that he'll be putting up later today.  But there are things in there like the blue ball in the last panel - to say nothing of the official "Hot-Dog Fairy" merchandise! - that began as anecdotes and have now graduated to true PAX lore.
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Arts & entertainment: The verdict on Damon Albarn's Monkey opera, plus what to look out for in the Manchester Festival.
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By RANDY MYERS  In the no-holds-barred blogosphere, every voice can be raised. But not everyone cares to listen.  Some visit blogs for updates on political chicanery, others to hear about a hot restaurant, movie, celebrity or technogadget.
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WinAmp, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player too Review Not every living-room computer is a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC or a Mac capable of running Apple's Front Row software. Both systems can connect to a TV and provide a remote control to help you select content to play, but there are plenty of older machines out there that have been put to use as song storage systems. What can they use?â¦
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Life & style: Gallery: Cuffs are gratifyingly hard to place - posh or high street?
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The EU Commission could fine Microsoft up to 5 percent of its daily turnover if things don't change. Also: Ford recalls almost 800,000 cars that spontaneously burst into flames & hellip;.  The money is rolling in on cell sales & hellip;. and more.
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Question: Whatâs the connection between an abandoned bathing suit and three cows? Answer: Nicole Kidman. The story goes this way: a bathing suit left by Ms. Kidman at a pool in Sweden is to be auctioned on Saturday to raise money to buy cows for poor families in India, Agence France-Presse reported. The suit, now owned by Zlatko Nedanovski and on display in a second-hand store in Eslov, a town in southern Sweden, will go to the highest bidder when the sale finishes on Saturday. Mr. Nedanovski, 32, bought the swimsuit for $778 after the staff at the pool turned it over to a local radio station. Ms. Kidman, an avid swimmer, forgot the suit at a pool she had reserved for her use in the town of Vanersborg in 2002 while in Sweden to film Lars von Trierâs âDogville.â Mr. Nedanovski said he hoped to raise $1,400 to buy five cows through the Swedish aid organization Erikshjaelpen. âToday,â he said, referring to an early bid, âwe have enough for three cows.â.
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Questions will be asked tonight at Madison Square Garden. Difficult questions. Questions about the futures of Felix Trinidad and Ricardo Mayorga. Very likely they will be questions only one of them will be able to answer.
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Comment is free: Xinran: The controversy over the posting of explicit images of celebrities reflects the resilience of old taboos outside the big cities
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Street hawkers are history. Savvy resellers use the web to turn tickets into cash. By Steve Knopper from Wired magazine.
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ÂThe lingering, perceived essence of anotherÂ sounds like the subject of a Proustian rumination. In fact, it is a line from an academic paper last April in The Journal of Marketing, by Jennifer J. Argo, Darren W. Dahl, and Andrea C. Morales. The authors examined a phenomenon that drives store managers crazy: consumers love to touch products in stores, but they hate buying things others have touched.
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The guessing game is almost over at the  Venice film festival, where few clear frontrunners for the  Golden Lion award for best picture have emerged ahead of the  prize ceremony on Saturday evening. By the end of the annual  11-day marathon of movies, press conferences, interviews and  parties, critics and journalists normally agree on a handful of  films they think could win the top honor, although their  predictions are not always correct.