Miguel Caetano

"O Projeto de Lei de Iniciativa Popular das Comunicações chegou às ruas no dia 1º de maio, o Dia do Trabalhador. O objetivo é que todos os brasileiros conheçam e se envolvam no debate pela democratização das comunicações e ingressar o projeto  no Congresso Nacional como vontade da população." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"The Barenaked Ladies, a children's choir, and the commander of the International Space Station. Put them together and what do you get? The first space-to-earth musical collaboration. The song, "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing) was commissioned by CBCMusic.ca and The Coalition for Music Education with the Canadian Space Agency to celebrate music education in schools across Canada." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"There was danger, hard graft, and the usual antics of life in orbit, but for millions of onlookers the latest mission to the International Space Station was about the rise of a new star: a moustached Canadian with a penchant for guitar. Chris Hadfield, Canada's first commander of the ISS, was due to land early on Tuesday after a five-month mission that raised the 53-year-old former test pilot to celebrity status around the world. His stint in space marks a shift in the astronaut breed, away from the robotic iciness of Nasa's early crews to the more modern species that openly revels in the wonder of falling round the Earth." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Manuel David Masseno" - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"In the latest quarter the iTunes top line grew by 32%. Additional newly reported items: Quarterly revenues topped $4 billion (a new high) and the company suggests that this rate is maintainable by stating it has a “$16 billion annual run rate”. The pattern of revenues is shown below." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"When you’re arguably the best-known astronaut ever to spend a stretch on the International Space Station, what better way to commemorate your ending tenure than recording David Bowie’s Space Oddity while in orbit? Commander Chris Hadfield, who returns to Earth along with Thomas H. Marshburn and Roman Romanenko late on Monday, May 13, recorded his own version of the classic from the ISS, complete with lingering views of Earth and almost as much lens-flare as a Star Trek reboot." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"O responsável do site apanhou dois meses de prisão, que foram trocados por multa. Na realidade, fizeram apenas “embed” do vídeo, não sendo os autores da transmissão. O site tem 10.000 visitas por dia e mais de 366 mil fãs no Facebook. Opera há seis anos como site de entretenimento. Cometeu um erro aparentemente gravíssimo: copiou um código HTML e colocou-o na sua página. O caso traz ao de cima a sensação que os juízes não percebem nada de Internet. O Tugaleaks falou com um dos responsáveis do site, que preferiu o anonimato. Conta-nos primeiro que tudo não ter falado com mais ninguém antes de falar com o Tugaleaks, mas saíram pelo menos três notícias (1, 2, 3) com um aparente favorecimento às declarações da SportTV. Isso não impediu a nossa fonte de nos contar o que aconteceu e de relembrar que “os jornais inventam e escrevem o que lhes é mandado por certos indivíduos. Tivemos a prova disso mesmo.”" - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Qué país de la eurozona está más endeudado? ¿Los griegos derrochadores, con sus generosas pensiones estatales? ¿Los chipriotas y sus bancos repletos de dinero sucio ruso? ¿Los españoles tocados por la recesión o los irlandeses en quiebra? Pues curiosamente son los holandeses sobrios y responsables. La deuda de los consumidores en los Países Bajos ha alcanzado el 250% de la renta disponible y es una de las más altas del mundo. Como comparación, España nunca ha superado el 125%." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"One of the premises of The Spectacle of Disintegration is that there’s the myth of the overcoming of the spectacular form in the age of the Internet, but what it does is make it microscopic and distribute it throughout the entire media sphere, so we now have micro-spectacular relations rather than one big macro one. So if you think about the old culture industry, everybody was critical of it, but at least it fucking entertained us! You would have all those flaws that Adorno spoke about, the extorted reconciliation of the ending, the equivalence of exchange values, but at least it was offered to you as something to consume. We’ve moved from the era of the culture industry to what I would call the vulture industry, which is companies like Google. I mean, in terms of culture, they don’t make shit. They just allow you to get to stuff that somebody else made. So now we have to even entertain each other. Go on, make some cat videos! So there’s a sense that on one side there’s the... more... - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"...the most common mistake is to mistake the current form of a technology for technology at its basic potential. How many times do we have to do the same old stupid bullshit over and over again? It’s all one-sided and undialectical and frankly very uninteresting. So alright you don’t like technology. Technology is the human. We’re the tool-making species. There is no human independent... more... - Miguel Caetano

"On a visit to Britain to participate in a debate on media piracy,  Ms Andersdotter said musicians and film-makers had no right to charge people for downloading their work for non-commercial use, and the public should be allowed to interact with it for free. There are other ways to fund films and music, she said, for example, through sponsorship deals or live performances: “A lot of the European film industry is sponsored by public money already.” “You don’t have the right to get money. If your idea was commercially uninteresting then maybe you need another idea,” she said." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Muitos milhares de pessoas manifestaram-se na tarde deste domingo em Madrid e em outras 20 cidades de Espanha, no segundo aniversário do 15-M. Os manifestantes protestaram contra a austeridade, os cortes e a política do governo. Em Madrid, o protesto terminou com um “grito mudo” e depois com as palavras de ordem “si, se puede” e “dimisión”, como se pode ver no vídeo." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"BANGALORE/DELHI: The government last month quietly began rolling out a project that gives it access to everything that happens over India's telecommunications network—online activities, phone calls, text messages and even social media conversations. Called the Central Monitoring System, it will be the single window from where government arms such as the National Investigation Agency or the tax authorities will be able to monitor every byte of communication." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"The discussion around people’s banished right to unlock their own cellphones has been framed as an unexpected and unanticipated effect of the copyright monopoly. To the contrary, it shows the heart of the monopoly’s philosophy: killing ownership as a concept." - Miguel Caetano

"So, again, a refusal of dealing with the harder legal and regulatory issues in a deliberative or participatory fashion will only reinforce the vagueness of legal frameworks and act as an incentive to legal terrorism. In the best case scenario, it represents a serious obstacle to society’s ability to enforce corporate, governmental and state accountability, making the legal system a shield of corruption and unlawful behavior. In the worst case, it perpetuates non-democratic regimes and practices, locking any form of resistance in a global network of surveillance, espionage and bullying." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Private torrent sites have a much lower profile than say, The Pirate Bay, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of them online, going about their business behind closed, invite-only walls. However, when it comes to providing access to content, private trackers are quite different from their public counterparts. Instead of a Pirate Bay-style free-for-all, access to pirate content is held back by site admins and only unlocked when members contribute to the health of the community." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Jornal "Folha de São Paulo", domingo, 24 de agosto de 1997" - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"The coastline along the city of Santos, some 80 km from Sao Paulo, in Brazil, offers a strange sight. Like dominoes about to topple, the waterfront is lined by a string of high rise apartments that are unmistakably tilted to one side. The problem lies in Santos’ soil. Below a seven-meter layer of sand is a 30-40 meter deep bed of slippery clay that doesn't cope well with the weight of the structures. Until 1968, the local building code had no restrictions whatsoever on the type of foundation that could be used for multistory buildings. Ideally, the foundations of buildings should reach bedrock, which in the region is about 50 meters deep. But these buildings in Santos’ waterfront has foundations that are only 4 or 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) deep. After the leaning in the first building became visible, there was realization that the practice of placing tall buildings on shallow footings could not continue, and a requirement was added to Santos building code to use deep foundation for tall buildings." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"O ritmo da queda não deixa margem para dúvidas: em meados da década passada, havia 1800 videoclubes. Em 2010, eram 300. Até ao final de 2013, metade dos 100 que ainda resistem acabará provavelmente por fechar, antecipa Nuno Pereira." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Até agora aderiram à iniciativa cerca de 150 lojas, depois de assinarem um regulamento que as obriga, entre outras coisas, a não aumentar os preços. Os donos de negócios podem utilizar os napos de várias maneiras, pois podem dá-los em troco a clientes que quiserem ou gastá-los noutras lojas." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Once we get past the dirty-data problem, we can consider the ways in which algorithms themselves are biased. News aggregator sites that use your personal preferences and click history to funnel in the latest stories on topics of interest also come with their own baked-in assumptions -- for example, assuming that frequency equals importance or that the most popular news stories shared on your social network must also be interesting to you. As an algorithm filters through masses of data, it is applying rules about how the world will appear -- rules that average users will never get to see, but that powerfully shape their perceptions." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Even though we don’t know for sure, there’s mounting evidence that e-books are more like music files than DVD movies: removing copy protection doesn’t hurt and might help. And there’s very little evidence that copy protection is stopping piracy." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"This book analyses the basic assumptions and premises of the notion of intellectual property as a right.It goes on to show how intellectual property rights prevent those who do not own them from accessing and exercising their own diverse rights. Thus, in a way, IPRs violate the very idea of individual autonomy onwhich it bases its claims. Highlighting the inherent propensity of IPRs to conflict with 'other rights of other peoples', this volume examines three important rights: health rights, indigenous peoples' knowledge rights, and farmers' rights." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"S’il est vrai que l’art commercial risque toujours de finir prostituée, il n’est pas moins vrai que l’art non commercial risque toujours de finir vieille fille (Erwin Panofsky)" - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Though establishing a basic income was once at the forefront of politics, it has since become more of a Utopian, abstract project. But sometimes it is helpful to step back from the day-to-day wonk work and think Utopian. First, what are some advantages of providing a universal basic income? To those on the left, a UBI would create greater equality by ending poverty and providing a minimum living standard. It would also increase bargaining power for workers, who could demand better working conditions with a safety cushion. As Erik Olin Wright argues in Envisioning Real Utopias, such bargaining power “will generate an incentive structure for employers to seek technical and organizational innovations that eliminate unpleasant work,” which would “have not just a labor-saving bias, but a labor-humanizing bias.”" - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"Want a flippant answer to the question of how to solve copyright problems? Stop having panel debates about copyright problems. Very little ever got solved through people with microphones arguing about collecting societies on a stage. This sarcasm is unworthy of the London School of Economics’ ‘The Theft of Creative Content: Copyright in Crisis’ event last night though. Co-organised with PRS for Music, its panelists offered more than just the usual grandstanding. The evening saw prepared speeches from PRS for Music boss Robert Ashcroft; Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter and LSE fellow in copyright law Dr Luke McDonagh, followed by an interview with songwriter and musician Eg White, and finally questions from the audience." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet

"We decided to experiment with a new, super-long article format akin to "slow live blogging." When we looked at the traffic charts below, our jaws dropped. Here's what we learned about long form stories--and why quality, not velocity, is the future of online news." - Miguel Caetano from Bookmarklet