World Airmail Links

Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes.

— Sidebar from How slumns can save the planet, citing Janice Perlman (main article by Stuart Brand)

Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be effective if Google were merely a predator. But this is the Internet, where copies are free, everyone could be a customer, your competitors are just a click away, and customer loyalty isn’t merely a consequence of geography. To treat the Internet merely as just another competitor is to miss the point that it’s a new medium which favours some business models and hurts others.

— Nat Torkington, Newspaper Paywalls

By their very nature, cameras result in underused and misallocated police resources.

— Bruce Schneier, Spy cameras won’t make us safer

SCM choice is a shibboleth.

— Jesse Vincent, on choice of source code management system

Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities. But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.

— Clifford I. Nass, psychology professor, Stanford University, quoted in Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention [via James]

Conventional parking policy counsels providing enough spots to handle car storage on the 30th busiest hour of the entire year, usually the weekend before Christmas. That means intentionally planning for an oversupply of parking the other 8,730 hours of the year.

— from Streetsblog’s Fun Facts About the Sad State of Parking Policy, culled from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy U.S. Parking Policies report [PDF]

People who aren’t accustomed to having a lot of ideas of their own have a very poor grasp of the odds that others might independently come up with the same ideas.

— Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Rowling’s being sued for plagiarism again [via Boing Boing]

We have all benefited from the extraordinary innovation delivered first by the independent software industry and more recently by the web services industry. In both cases, this innovation was a direct result of the ability to innovate without permission.

— Brad Burnham, Software patents are the problem not the answer [via Stephen Johnson]

Any use of legislation or technology that tries to control what people can do with digital media objects, once they’ve been transmitted, is broken. Also any business model that relies on such control.

— Tim Bray, Let Your Data Go

Trust me: If you talk to an unemployed, uninsured mother of two in Greenville, she’ll tell you that jobs and reliable medical coverage come a distant second to the crafting of meticulous talking points that deftly omit the facts and reduce what should be honest discourse about our country’s future to a series of contrived, easy-to-digest sound bites designed to sway crucial independent voters.

— “House Minority Leader John Boehner,” My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs, Health Care, And The Economy [via Charlie Todd]