Mekka

Linkin Park wants a Warner-free IPO

Cory Doctorow:

"Linkin Park is looking to float an IPO, but only if it can get out of its deal with Warner: it's not longer interested in being tied to a label, and intends to release its music strictly over the Internet from now on.

The band claims it has been responsible for ten percent of the label's record sales over the past five years. Linkin Park owes Warner Music four more albums, but the band says they're looking into releasing music over the Internet and it does not plan to deliver a new album to Warner."

Link 

[Via Boing Boing]

Craigslist for-rent ads scraped and placed on Google Maps

Craigslist for-rent ads scraped and placed on Google Maps

 

Cory Doctorow: "This hack on Craigslist and GoogleMaps is amazing: the service places all the houses/apartments for rent/sale on Craigslist as waypoints on a Google Map, color-coded by price, with links to the Craigslist ads. Wow. " Link 

(via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

[Boing Boing]

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin - Mark Cuban

"...The only question is who will be the first label to crack and offer this and how soon will it be. Of course  the cynics will say that this won’t ever happen, but I’m not buying it. It’s too much cash up front for the labels to  say no to. It also makes too much business sense.

When it happens, the music industry will EXPLODE and sales and profits will go through the  roof.

Why? Because stores can be smaller, physical inventories minimal to non-existent, and an entire segment of middle  infrastructure on both the label and retailer side for ordering, delivering, warehousing, duplicating, returning, and forecasting of product can be eliminated.

Most importantly, that money can be spent to develop, market and promote music so that more and more people can  experience it, and also, just in case hell freezes over, be used to lower the price of music to consumers

Once that first label, or the first organized group of indies goes purely digital at retail, then the countdown  for the extinction of the CD begins. T-minus 5 years from that first day, and your CDs will be sitting right next to  the LPs your dad and mom collected when they were kids.

Until then, if Im a band selling on my own, I’m carrying a laptop to every show, and charging 5 bucks to drop a  show on an IPod. Call it concertpodding.

If I’m an indie record store, I’m making sure that all music from the labels you support is available for direct  to player. I’m offering every song as Ipod or MP3 player ready to anyone who walks in the door with their Ipod and  wants to leave listening to the music.

It’s money in the bank."

[Via Mark Cuban]

Carbon-Eating Cement

Carbon-Eating Cement

TecEco have developed cement technologies able to transform city streets and buildings into carbon "sinks", rather than sources.

By blending magnesium oxide and conventional cements, this environment-friendly cement uses a lower heating temperature during manufacturing, so less fossil fuels are used.

Once it's in porous concrete form, eco-cement needs carbon dioxide to harden and set. Therefore, it absorbs large quantities of the greenhouse gas that concrete is partially responsible for, contributing about 10% of global CO2 emissions.

Picture is the world's first eco-cement porous pavement in Tasmania.

Video.
Via archinect.

[Via we make money not art]

Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle

Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle

Packard Jenning 's Il Duce Action Figure involves both the insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart and documentation of the ensuing comical conundrums (video of confused workers assigning a value to the item, manual entry of 'Mussolini' onto the receipt, etc.).

Il Duce Action Figure is part of Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle which instigates the insertion of art into conglomerate retail stores. The exhibition runs march 11 05 - april 10 05 at the Pond gallery in San Francisco.

Another artist featured in the exhibtion is Conrad Bakker who, in his Untitled Projects series (Consumer Actions, Untitled Products, etc.), highlights the role of labor involved in commodity production and consumption.

In Mail Order Catalog, he painted and carved wooden objects to resemble functioning technology (radar detectors, binoculars, lighters, flashlights). The items bear traces of their production: visible chisel marks, brush strokes from the oil paint, and imperfections. Bakker marketed them through a catalogue at prices comparable to the products they resemble. Shoppers calling the catalogue’s number found themselves in intimate conversation with the artist, who took orders, shipped items, and produced more on demand, a process which often took considerable time. By emphasizing the relationships built between shopper and artist, Bakker presents an alternate economic model—a hybrid between a gift economy and commodity-based culture.

Via core77.

[we make money not art]

This is no photoshop tennis

This is no photoshop tennis:

An artificial court has been especially laid for champions Roger Federer and Andre Agassi on the heliport of the 7-star Burj Al Arab hotel for Dubai Duty Free Men's Open.

More pictures.
Via Archinect.

Ancient village, graveyard torn apart by bridge project

Tse-whit-zen. Excavation for the Hood Canal Bridge near Seattle has unearthed a huge prehistoric Indian village and alienated tribal spiritual leaders.
[MetaFilter]

Canon's turn: the EOS-1Ds Mark II digital SLR, the PowerShot SD20, the PowerShot SD200, and the PowerShot SD300

= Christmas is just too damn far away... =

"Alright, rounding things out, Canon dropped four new cameras on us today, including that

EOS-1Ds Mark digital SLR that we speculated about

yesterday, the PowerShot SD20, the PowerShot SD200, and the PowerShot SD300. Here’s the dirt on each of them:

align="top" border="0" height="428" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="425" />

Just like everyone expected, the EOS-1Ds Mark II is Canon’s 16.7 megapixel follow-up to the EOS-1Ds, which bumps up the

megapixel count by nearly six million and sports faster continuous shooting of 4 fps. Other upside: a new 802.11g

attachment so you can wireless beam your photos back to a PC over a WiFi network (yep, Nikon has

one of those, too).

Read - Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II

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Canon’s smallest five megapixel digital camera, the PowerShot SD20 will come in four different colors (they even have

faux impressive-sounding names like Platinum Silver, Midnight Blue, Bordeaux Red and Storm Grey) and is really

small and all that, but they cut one big corner to get there: no optical zoom lens.

Read - Canon PowerShot SD20

src="http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/4608484415104605.JPG?0.050852326027112094" align="top" border="0"

height="271" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="425" />

Except for the difference in resolution, the threemegapixel PowerShot SD200 and the four megapixel PowerShot SD300

(pictured above) are essentially the same camera. Both have a 3x optical zoom lens and are just eight-tenths of an inch

thick.

Read - Canon PowerShot SD200 and PowerShot"

SD300 [Engadget]

The man behind HyperSonic Sound

border="1" height="133" width="140"

src="http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/6313211443253965.JPG?0.15407513169095843" />

We’ve written a few times already about HyperSonic Sound, that superdirectional speaker which can project a beam of

sound directly to just one person, but we hadn’t known was that its creator, a self-taught inventor by the name of

Woody Norris, also invented the first palm-sized digital voice recorder and a hands-free headset that uses bone

conduction to transmit sound. Forbes.com has a brief profile of him and his company. [Engadget]

The Fair Tax

The FairTax is a consumption tax designed to replace the entire federal income tax system, including personal, payroll, corporate, self-employment, capital gains, gift, and inheritance taxes. The FairTax will allow Americans to keep 100% of their paychecks (minus any state income taxes), it will dramatically reduce pre-tax prices, and it will fully fund the Federal government, including Social Security and Medicare.

With the FairTax, you will get to take home 100% of your paycheck (minus any state income taxes). No federal income taxes or payroll taxes will be withheld from your paycheck, pension, or Social Security check.

Did you know that hidden income taxes currently make up 20% to 30% of all retail prices? It's true. According to Dr. Dale Jorgenson of Harvard, hidden income taxes are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, from 20% to 30% higher than they would otherwise be for everything you buy.

Therefore, when the FairTax Act of 2001 abolishes the federal income tax system, prices will drop 20% to 30%. The proposed FairTax rate is 23%. So, instead of paying 15.3% of your paycheck in payroll taxes, plus an average of 18% of your paycheck in federal income tax, for a total of about 33% of your paycheck going to the federal government in Washington, you pay only a 23% consumption tax each time you purchase a new good or service for your own personal consumption above the federal poverty level.

At this 23% rate, the FairTax will pay for all current government operations, including Social Security and Medicare. With a consumption tax like the FairTax, government revenues will be even more stable than they are now because consumption tends to be more constant than income.

With the FairTax, if you choose to buy any new good or service for yourself, a consumption tax of 23%, will be added into the price. If you choose to buy used goods -- used car, used home, used clothing -- you do not pay the FairTax. If, as a business owner, you buy something for strictly business purposes (not for personal consumption), you pay no consumption tax. So, in deciding what to buy, you get to choose whether or not you will pay the federal consumption tax.

Perhaps most importantly, to ensure that no American will pay tax on necessities, the FairTax plan provides a prepaid, monthly rebate for every registered household to cover the 23% consumption tax spent on necessities up to the federal poverty level. This is how the FairTax completely untaxes the poor, and lowers the tax burden on everyone else. Can you see how much freer life will be with the FairTax instead of the income tax? [Found via MetaFilter]