March 9, 2011
A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity. Popular social news websites include Slashdot, Fark, Digg and Reddit. All social news websites allow the users to submit the content in some way. Each site differs in how the content is moderated. On Slashdot and Fark, for example, the administrators of the site decide which articles make it to the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community will make it to the front page.
Many social news websites also feature a comment system, where users can form a discussion based on each article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first.
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March 9, 2011
Bob Peak (1927 – 1992) was an American commercial illustrator best known for innovative design in the development of the modern movie poster. United Artists studio hired Peak in 1961 to design the poster images for the film ‘West Side Story.’ The success of Peak’s work on that film led to work on posters for designer Bill Gold.
In the mid-1970’s Peak’s style would become familiar to fans of science fiction films when he created the poster art for the futuristic film ‘Rollerball’ (1975), which was followed by the first six ‘Star Trek’ films, ‘Superman’ (1978), ‘Excalibur’ (1981), ‘In Like Flint,’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979). By the 1980’s only the movie poster artist Drew Struzan was in as much demand by film directors.
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March 9, 2011
In Computer science, ‘The Cloud‘ is a marketing term for the Internet. In the case of electricity, users can simply use it. They do not need to worry where the electricity is from, how it is generated, or transported. At the end of the month, they will get a bill for the amount of electricity they consumed. The idea behind cloud computing is similar: The user can simply use storage, computing power, or specially crafted development environments, without having to worry how these work internally.
The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet based on how the internet is described in computer network diagrams; which means it is an abstraction hiding the complex infrastructure of the internet.
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March 9, 2011
The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is an ethical code: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. It is arguably the basis for the modern concept of human rights, in which each individual has a right to just treatment, and a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others. A key element of the Golden Rule is that a person attempting to live by this rule treats all people with consideration, not just members of his or her in-group.
The ethic of reciprocity was present in certain forms in the philosophies of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Persia, India, Greece, Judea, and China. Examples of statements that mirror the Golden Rule appear in Ancient Egypt, for example in the story of ‘The Eloquent Peasant’ which is dated to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (c. 2040–1650 BCE): ‘Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do.’ The label ‘golden’ is believed to have been applied by Confucius (551–479 BCE).
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March 9, 2011
Rubber is a 2010 French horror comedy film about a tire that comes to life and kills people with its psychic powers. It was directed and written by Quentin Dupieux (also known as Mr. Oizo). The soundtrack was scored by Justice. The film was screened at the 2010 Cannes film festival where it was not well received.
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March 9, 2011
Javelin is a hip-hop and electro production duo based in Brooklyn, New York City via Providence, RI. Javelin has been known to use colorfully painted boomboxes that hang from the ceiling or stack up on the floor like pyramids. The signal from the show is broadcast via FM transmitter, thereby fostering audience participation (B.Y.O. Boombox) or fueling battery-powered, mobile parties.
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March 9, 2011
Moleskine is an Italian brand of notebooks. Moleskine books are typically bound in coated paper cardboard, with an elastic band to hold the notebook closed, a sewn spine that allows it to lie flat when opened, cream color paper, rounded corners, a ribbon bookmark, and an expandable pocket inside the rear cover. Among artists who used similar black notebooks were Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse.
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March 9, 2011
The World Federalist Movement (WFM) is a global citizens movement with member and associate organizations around the world. The WFM International Secretariat is based in New York City across from the United Nations headquarters.
Founded in 1947 in Montreux, Switzerland, the Movement brings together organizations and individuals which support the establishment of a global federal system of strengthened and democratized global institutions with plenary constitutional power accountable to the citizens of the world and a division of international authority among separate global agencies.
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March 9, 2011
Individual sovereignty (or self-ownership) is the concept of property in one’s own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to Marxist philosopher G. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership is that ‘each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply.’
Sovereign individuals have supreme authority over their own choices, without the interference of governing powers, provided they have not violated the rights of others. This notion is central to classical liberalism, abolitionism, libertarianism, objectivism, and anarchism. Sovereign-minded individuals would then seem to prefer an atmosphere consisting of decentralized administrative organizations acting as servants to the individual.
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March 9, 2011
Balkan Beat Box is an Israeli musical group founded by ex-Gogol Bordello member Tamir Muskat, Ori Kaplan of Firewater and Big Lazy, and Tomer Yosef. As a musical project they often cooperate with a host of other musicians both in the studio as well as live.
Co-founders Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat both met in Brooklyn, New York as teenagers. Both had grown up with music and Kaplan had been a klezmer clarinetist, while Muskat was a drummer in a punk band. They began playing together and had trouble finding a style that they felt represented themselves, so they decided to create one. They established their own unique sound by fusing the musical styles of Mediterranean and Balkan traditions with hip-hop and dancehall beats.
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March 9, 2011
Moog synthesizer [mohg] (pronounced like ‘vogue’) may refer to any number of analog synthesizers designed by Dr. Robert Moog or manufactured by Moog Music, and is commonly used as a generic term for analog and digital music synthesizers. The company pioneered the commercial manufacture of analog synthesizers in the early 1950s. The technological development that led to the creation of the Moog synthesizer was the invention of the transistor, which enabled researchers like Moog to build electronic music systems that were considerably smaller, cheaper and far more reliable than earlier vacuum tube-based systems.
The Moog synthesizer began to gain wider attention in the music industry after it was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The commercial breakthrough of a Moog recording was made by Wendy Carlos in the 1968 record ‘Switched-On Bach,’ which became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era. In 1974 the German electronic group Kraftwerk further popularized the sound of the synthesizer with their landmark album ‘Autobahn,’ which used several types of synthesizer including a Minimoog. German-based Italian producer-composer Giorgio Moroder helped to shape the development of disco music also used Moog synthesizers.
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March 9, 2011
Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions.
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