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WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER (SUNDAY MORNING LINKS)
Here are a few links I sent to my Instapaper account and have been reading this weekend.
* When we queried a few filmmakers for a column on software and apps in the new issue of Filmmaker, I noted the number of respondents who had migrated to the Android operating system. I recalled meeting an Android developer at SXSW this year, and he told me he was planning for the platform’s rapid rise. He also said that he was an Apple fan too, and he felt the competition would be a good thing for both platforms. There’s an exchange along these lines going on between Robert Scoble at his Scobleizer blog (“Why I Can’t Kick the iPhone Habit”) and Louis Gray (“Why I Turned in My iPhone and Went Android”). For those interested in the future of mobile platforms and how choice is playing out in the marketplace, they are worth a read. (Related from Barrons: “How Google’s Android Could Overtake Apple’s iPhone.”)
* Via Derren Brown’s blog, night owls are smarter than other people.
* I’m just starting Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, his book on videogaming, and noted Chuck Tryon’s blog post about the history of Roger Ebert’s relationship to the medium and what that has to say about media criticism. (For those who don’t know, Ebert has recently stirred up a lot of debate in the blogosphere over his since revised statement that “Video Games Can Never be Art.”)
* At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow notes Brazil’s copyright law, which levies fines against rightsholders who prevent fair use of their materials through implementation of DRM.
* This is from nine days ago, but if you missed it, the attempt by a law firm and group of producers, including those behind The Hurt Locker, to sue filesharers, has hit legal roadblocks.
* I recently watched Lucy Walker’s well-made and compelling documentary on nuclear weapons, Countdown to Zero. As a kid I was terrified by nuclear war — I still remember watching Fail Safe on TV. As a political science major in college Graham Allison’s work on the Cuban Missile Crisis was compelling. So, the film’s artful sequence imagining the physical effects of nuclear war was like revisiting old fears. The film, however, isn’t just about doom-mongering but instead a proscriptive for international policies designed to reduce the threat of nuclear war — namely, the reduction of nuclear arsenals. Anyway, I thought about Walker’s doc this morning as I read this post via The Agonist titled “Picturing Obama Authorizing a Nuclear Attack,” which focuses not so much on the physical effects of an attack on U.S. soil but its political aftermath.
