Pogue lays out the situation calmly and clearly. Its worth a read.

Some people are O.K. with the goals of the bills, acknowledging that software piracy is out of control; they object only to the bills’ approaches. If the entertainment industry’s legal arm gets out of control, they say, they could deem almost anything to be a piracy site. YouTube could be one, because lots of videos include bits of TV shows and copyrighted music. Facebook could be one, because people often link to copyrighted videos and songs. Google and Bing would be responsible for removing every link to a questionable Web site. Just a gigantic headache.

But there’s another group of people with a different agenda: They don’t even agree with the bills’ purpose. They don’t want their free movies taken away. A good number of them believe that free music and movies are their natural-born rights. They don’t want the big evil government taking away their free fun.

The second group of people is the group I don’t want to be associated with. This is what clouds my support for the entire protest.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

There’s no doubt piracy is wrong but having Congress, many of whom still think the internet is a “series of tubes” design laws to protect copyrighted material maybe isn’t the best way to go about stopping it.

fightforthefuture.org/pipa

[via The Kid Should See This]

This is an excellent video of both portraits and behind the scenes process of how photographer Peter Hapak put together his collection for an issue of Time Magazine.

Reminds me of Irving Penn’s traveling studio (below):

[via PetaPixel]

Election workers are taking the iPads to disabled voters who might otherwise have difficulties marking their ballots, the AP wrote. These voters are able to pull up the ballot on the iPad and tap the screen to mark the candidate of their choice before printing out their completed ballot. After that, voters will send in their votes in a much more traditional way: by mail.

Apple Inc. donated five iPads to the state for the program, and Oregon shelled out about $75,000 to make the software, the AP reported. According to Secretary of State Kate Brown and the state elections director, Steve Trout, the office tested several different types of devices before settling on the iPad.

Now, how about using iPads so the rest of us can “vote different.”

[via Gary Sharp]

I saw the Colossal post first, then followed it to Visual News: Show me your Money Face!, then followed it to The 99% Behind the Money.

Great and fun meme that has been around long before the Occupy Wall Street Movement started although I certainly get why folks in that movement would want to play with it.

I get the quarterly magazine of University of Oregon alumni, Oregon Quarterly. In this month’s issue is a piece about a group I used to follow with interest, a tree planting collective called The Hoedads (named after the hoe like tool used to dig a hole and plant a seedling).

I used to run into groups of Hoedads both in rock climbing circles and at various “hippy” restaurants in Eugene. I always admired this group for putting their money where their political mouths were. Most of us complained about our lot in life but did little about it. These folks took the bull by the horns and did something good and it worked for a long time and did good.

The images are wonderful and they bring back memories of Eugene, Oregon in the ’70s and ’80s.

The American Civil Liberties Union overview of your rights as a photographer in the United States.

There was an interesting piece on The PBS NewsHour last night on Americans Elect, a group attempting to use the web to offer Americans a different way of becoming involved in the political process: ‘Americans Elect’ Group Challenges U.S. Presidential Primary Process. While I was interested in the concept neither guest made clear what the site is about and it left me wondering. However, I’m interested in almost any alternative to our current corrupt and broken political process so I’m giving it a try.

I just signed up and started answering the interesting questions to establish “my colors” which look like this so far. I’ll answer more questions and get a new set of colors no doubt:

I hope Americans Elect turns into something. I’m guardedly hopeful.

[via Scott James]

Alan Taylor continues his series at the Atlantic’s In Focus on World War II in Photos.

This impressive collection includes a few images from Ansel Adams who was doing commercial photography for the State of California and the US government at the time.

The internment of Japanese Americans remains one of the most embarrassing and stupid ideas in US history, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mistakes.

It’s old news that HP has decided to sell off its computer business. The fact that the tablet and smartphone OS that Palm had in the works that HP bought runs faster on an iPad (iOS) or even as a web application under Safari is significant. What’s even more significant to me is the reason for the sluggishness:

The report notes that the TouchPad hardware had essentially already been designed when HP acquired Palm last year, with the engineers tasked with getting webOS running on the existing design. The resulting handicap of outdated hardware reportedly crippled the webOS team’s ability to innovate for the tablet platform and ultimately led to the poor market reception.

This strikes me as a blunder of enormous proportions and this is the place where Apple has consistently done better than the competition: Macs are designed to run OS X and OS X is designed to run on Macs. iPhones and iPads (and other devices) are designed to run iOS and iOS is designed to run on these devices.

Tight integration between hardware and software is one of the many ingredients of Apple’s success. It seems a shame that webOS, what many have considered a decent operating system, is orphaned because HP didn’t built hardware specifically for it. Why they didn’t do that is no doubt all about internal politics.

Which leads me to this: Steve Jobs is certainly a genius when it comes to product innovation and marketing but what may be his most important attribute is his ability to cut through the politics and push through what needs to be pushed through to get well designed products shipped.