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Ivo Skoric | 1 Jul 05:30

New Business Heaven in Europe

www.investinmacedonia.com

This week's The Economist features full page color ad (probably
expensive) "Invest in Macedonia - New Business Heaven in Europe",
all with the graph of (growing, of course) MBI-10 Macedonian Stock
Exchange Index.

All post-communist countries today proudly flout their stock          
exchanges, trading dozen or so stocks, like some sort of tropheys. I  
found myself chuckling at claims about "excellent infrastructure",    
because I travelled through Macedonia a couple of times during 1980-  
s, and I think it is slightly preposterous to advertise free access   
to large market of 650 million customers, that includes 27 EU an      
d 13 other European countries with which Macedonia has Free Trade     
Agreements: you can open a business in Austria and be closer to that  
market, with advantages of even more excellent infrastructure.        

Also, with probably a decade before it is accepted in the EU,
Macedonia is presented as EU & NATO candidate country (the official
name of FYROM is mentioned nowhere in the ad): but Europe is full of
countries that already are NATO and EU countries, so being a candidate
can obviously not be sold as an advantage. But there are things about
Macedonia that can: 10% flat tax, lure of laissez fair corporate
pundits, both corporate and personal income flat tax, and 10 years
FREE of corporate tax if your business is in one of the two designated
Free Economic Zones & Technology Parks (Skopje and Stip).

Besides liberal approach to taxation, the other advantage, shamelessly
advetised both in The Economist and on the website, is CHEAP LABOR:
"abundant and competitive labour with 370 euros a month average gross
(Continue reading)

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carl guderian | 2 Jul 14:09

Re: Tactical Media Efforts of the Iraqi Sunni Insurgency -- an extensive case study

It's like Tiger Beat for teenage boys with high-speed internet,  
probably like the kids who pestered some Amsterdam gallery owners,  
including my girlfriend, for awhile. One of the kids signed the  
guestbook SHIRA, like the logo of a Swedish black metal band. Shira  
means someone who has sold himself to God, but this particular kid  
was just a schlub. They all drifted away eventually, and the majority  
of the kids who download al-Zarqawi's bio (likes: shura, veiled  
sisters; dislikes: Jews, Crusaders) probably just delete it later.

Speaking of entertaining downloads, the fabled Jihad Manual should  
carry a disclaimer about making car bombs when you don't have access  
to Semtex and all the other evil professional-grade toys a war zone  
and helpful foreigners have to offer. Two duds and a flaming  
slapfight with a Glasgow cop were just embarrassing--Anarchist  
Cookbook-level stuff.

Carl
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Patrice Riemens | 2 Jul 12:18
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Fwdfyi: GPLv3 officially released (on June 29th) & some comments.

Bwo Pranesh Prakash, Commons-Law list
 Mon, 2 Jul 2007 
(I did 'some' - pffff... - editing)

Dear All,

On Friday, June 29, 2007, GPL Version 3 was officially released.

Around ten days back, Bruce Perens published a really good article on
Technocrat, titled Clearing up anti-GPL3

<http://technocrat.net/d/2007/3/22/16651>.

In that article, Perens argues that GPL3 is necessary to keep up with
changing technologies and to prevent innovative ways in which GPL2 could be
by-passed (which was revealed during GPL3's draft stages by last
year's Novell-Microsoft deal

<http://news.com.com/Microsoft+paying+Novell+308+million+for+Linux+pact/2100-1014_3-6133361.html>(also

see this humourous visual timeline of the deal, 

<http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20070128.ars>

and vehemently (and successfully, IMHO) contests charges that GPL3 seeks 
to weaken DRMs.  (These charges, I might add, were more than valid up to 
the 2nd draft of GPL3, when DRMs were outright banned

<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060120-6024.html>.
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matthew fuller | 2 Jul 21:56
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MEEF, My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend

MEEF Vocabulary Specification 0.1
Namespace Document 21 June 2007

Abstract MEEF,  My Enemy’s Enemy is my Friend uses the World Wide Web
Consortium’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) to allow for automatic
generation of ontology for networks based upon shared antipathies

Status of this Document. This is the first draft proposal specification
for MEEF.  It provides a description of a basic vocabulary which can be
used in generating MEEF applications.  MEEF files can be added to
documents and web resources as Unicode. Versions of MEEF will
incorporate the FOAF vocabulary in order that friends of your enemies
can also be readily identifiable.

MEEF Class and Properties

Class Class:meef:entity
There is only one class in the MEEF vocabulary,
that of an entity, a thing, person, class of people, or organisation
that corresponds to the definition, ‘enemy’.

Properties
Properties have a substantially larger range.  They can be
used to state what you despise about your enemy, why they are your
enemy, what you are prepared to join together to do about it, and to
suggest properties of the entity which are deserving of mutual attack.

Property:Antipathy:open
Property:Antipathy:hidden
Whilst some actions described in the actionable kind of property
(Continue reading)

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Stacy Lienemann | 3 Jul 00:01
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nettime / OURSPACE: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture

Dear ListServ Administrator:

Please post this to nettime.  Also, please let me know if you'd like to
review the book for your listserv. Thanks!

Best wishes,
Stacy Lienemann
Direct Response and Scholarly Promotions Manager
University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
612-627-1934
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Culture jamming is so twentieth century! What?s next?

OURSPACE: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
Christine Harold
University of Minnesota Press | 232 pages | 2007
ISBN 978-0-8166-4954-9 | hardcover | $24.95

In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of
?culture jamming? by activists. For Harold, it is a different type of
opposition that offers a genuine alternative to corporate consumerism.
Exploring the revolutionary Creative Commons movement, copyleft, and open
source technology, Harold advocates a more inclusive approach to
intellectual property that invites innovation and wider participation in the
creative process.

?This book deftly navigates the borders between markets and publics. And it
(Continue reading)

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Geert Lovink | 3 Jul 10:26
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no comments?

This is what Rhizome made of it... Anyone at nettime has already seen 
this show and would like to comment on it? Best, Geert

New Media History Refreshed

As with any vibrant art form, new media finds itself historicized
in multiple and evolving ways. Significant attention has been paid
to whether the field is alive, dead (date negotiable), or risen
from the grave, and to defining its constituent elements. Automatic
Update, an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art organized
by Barbara London, argues that new forms of media art rose with
the swell of the dot-com era and became mainstream in its wake.
The five installations included, all drawn from the moment after
the bubble burst, speak less to the internet or interactivity and
more to a culture saturated with media of all kinds. As markers
of this designated cultural moment, the works on view vary widely
in their ideas and approaches. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy explore
the interplay between the construction of cinematic genre and the
development of personal history in Our Second Date (2004). Xu Bing
ponders remote communication in Book from the Ground (2007, and in!
-progress) in which a dialogue between two individuals, separated
by a mylar screen, is translated into a vocabulary of computer-like
icons. Also featured are new and recent works by Cory Arcangel, Paul
Pfeiffer, and Rafael Lozano-Hammer. It's arguable whether new media
art has become mainstream, yet the assertion that the Internet has
fundamentally changed contemporary culture and propelled new art forms
is undeniable. This influence is explored in screenings organized by
London with Hanne Mugaas that run concurrently with the exhibition,
including signature works by film and video-makers such as Iara Lee,
Kristin Lucas, Takeshi Murata, Miranda July and Marcin Ramocki, among
(Continue reading)

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Michael H Goldhaber | 3 Jul 19:06
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Re:SHOWING


Jordan's interesting observation parallels my predictions for a
long time about an economy based on the desire for and scarcity of
attention from others. Self-revelation is generally a good way to
garner attention, or to add to attention one gets from the already
attentive. Whether the lack he proposes is internal to the psyche or
simply a consequence of the normal human need for attention, and its
increasing scarcity as a result of the intensified competition for it,
I am not so sure.

The abundance of "surplus energy" is also a valid point, in that the
forms of energetic activities such as farming or manufacturing work
that had to be carried on by the majority in the past have now been
out-moded, leading to affluent searches for outlets for many in the
"advanced" world, and much more impoverished searches for the same
for others in the same countries and even more in the others. the
rise of the Attention Society is one result. ( The phrase "Attention
Economy" which I long have used for this new "mode of production"
has apparently been bowdlerized to mean something having to do with
advertising, so I am returning to an older phrase.)

Often the outlet in the poorest countries is constant war,
making them even poorer. ( This comes out, in spite of
everything , in pro- imperialist Niall Fergusons's NY Times
review of conservative(?) Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Ferguson-
t.html_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin. ) One can hope that as cheaper
ways to use the Internet proliferate even there, and as new methods
of seeking attention, or at least the capacity to play Grand Theft
Auto are spread, war will not seem as good an outlet even among the
(Continue reading)

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Florian Cramer | 3 Jul 15:48

Josephine Bosma, Mediated Remains (Piet Zwart catalogue essay)


[This essay was written by Josephine Bosma for the graduation show
catalogue of the Media Design M.A. programme of the Piet Zwart
Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam. The show will open on
Saturday, July 7th, 15:00 + 21:00, at WORM, Achterhaven 148, 
3024 RC Rotterdam <http://www.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=1002> -F]

Mediated Remains: hidden bits of ourselves

The Human System

Technology is part of the body. Humans have been able to sustain
themselves in the world by incorporating bits and pieces of that
same world into their own expanding physical system (the monkey and
his stick are one). A celebration of technology is a celebration of
ourselves. A critique of technology is a critique of ourselves. An
investigation of technological systems and errors is an investigation
of the way we recreate and handle ourselves. The 'body' can be
perceived as a collection of systems and fragments of systems. It is
at the same time dispersed and whole. We are experiencing a continuous
but fruitful fragmentation and recombination.

The 2007 graduation show of the media design students of the Piet
Zwart Institute seems to revolve around one theme, even if it was not
consciously chosen. All works show a fascination for obscurity, for
the hidden, for the disappearing, for the superfluous. The graduates
explore drifting fragments of ourselves in our media environment.
These fragments are sometimes part of hidden processes and at other
times they are (remnants of) unwanted objects: trashed bits. A few of
the projects are not based on the obviously hidden. These projects
(Continue reading)

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Alex Foti | 3 Jul 11:57
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molleindustria and noblogs censored in italy for game "pretofilia" (priestophilia)

the request came from a centrist catholic mp who's notorious for his
crusades against any form of dissent targeting the vatican. the
center-left gov't complied.

here's the game:

http://babau.indivia.net/ciarpame/pretofilia.swf

where you're a cardinal that has to prevent news of sexual abuses by
priests on children from spreading out from alarmed parents to to
police and media....

clerical obscurantism really seems in full bloom in spaghettiland,

lx

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: hop <hop@...>
Date: Jul 3, 2007 11:29 AM
Subject: [RK] la madonna non =E8 libera di piangere sperma e noblogs
viene censurato
To: rekombinant@...

con preghiera di diffusione

da ieri notte il circuito noblogs.org (autistici/inventati) =E8 in down
per ingiunzione ministeriale in quando resosi reo di ospitare il
giochino "pretofilia" sviluppato dal gruppo molleindustria.

si richiede di mirrorare e diffondere il giochino il pi=F9 possibile.
(Continue reading)

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espanz | 3 Jul 15:29

Last night god called America


Here a report from autistici/inventati italian independent server, being
censored after mirroring the latest flash game released by
Molleindustria, Pretophilia (available at
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/385299).

report this and spread onto your blogs
espanz

-------

Last Night God called America
Molleindustria.it is a site publishing satirical flash games with
provocative political content. Its last game, called =93Pretofilia=94 (i.e.
Priestophilia), is a denunciation of the widespread use of pedophilia as
an excuse for censorship, and of the widespread abuse on children in the
catholic church.

After its publishing, the site has been immediately subjected to the
attention of the Italian Parliament and the Interior Ministry answered
prompting the police to act against the site. Molleindustria decided
then to remove the game, but the file had already been spread far and
wide on the Internet.

Soon after the news of the censorship threat was made known on the
website, the game was mirrored even more, eventually also on some blogs
on our noblogs.org platform.

After all that had been said and done on this harmless satire, we would
not dare to say we did not expect some threats to our servers, but we
(Continue reading)

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Gmane