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April 29, 2006
~This idiot box is the pupil in the retina which makes up the all-seeing eye.~
YouTube spends a mil a month for bandwidth. via
The bandwidth companies typically charge video sites up to a penny per minute of video streamed. Big players who buy in bulk get discounted rates: Industry observers estimate that YouTube, which is streaming 40 million videos and 200 terabytes of data per day, may be paying between a tenth of a cent and half a cent per minute. Neither YouTube nor Limelight would comment on their pricing.
Feds hide illegal domestic spying as state secret. The Bush administration is stymieing the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T. The EFF has a former AT&T employee who claims the telecom giant is illegally allowing the NSA to record every single bit of internet traffic, and now the government's saying that it falls under state secret privilege. via
The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used "State Secrets Privilege" -- the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb -- in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T that alleges the telecom collaborated with the government's secret spying on American citizens.
The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.
In related news, the federal government used national security letters 3,501 times last year. via
The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court's approval, the Justice Department said Friday.
It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge's approval or a grand jury subpoena.
The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.
The department also reported it received a secret court's approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records.
The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005.
The spike is expected to be temporary, however, because the Patriot Act renewal that President Bush signed in March made it easier for authorities to obtain subscriber information on telephone numbers captured through certain wiretaps.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Devil's Music (The comments are great.) via
On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner's Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons.
But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil's Interval by medieval musicians.
"[Dissonance] is something that yearns to be resolved. A very good example would be the opening of West Side Story, Maria. It wants to resolve into the next note. It is a special kind of tension. It gives that angular, edgy, spooky feel. Film music is often extremely sophisticated at signalling to a listener here is a particular kind of character. It is a leitmotif, first used by Wagner."
Never mind the tritone, some music scholars even thought the major scale was the devils work! Belive it or not, but the notes behind such diabolic tunes as 'doh a deer' and 'row row row your boat' was once considered satanic. Aparrently it made you want to do naughty things, and so was dubbed 'the lustful scale'. Funny thing is, it's now been the basis of western music for at least five hundred years, and what once was 'pagan' and degenerate was soon used to compose many religious songs/masses, nursery rymes and folk songs. It kind of reminds me of how ragtime and jazz were viewed not so long ago.....
Shane, London
It seems much more likely that the use of the tritone in Heavy Rock comes from it's origins in blues music. The ubiquitous blues scale derives much of its tonal character from the tritone at its center.
Noel, Nottingham
Tritones don't have to sound evil or demonic. When used in jazz they can sound very beautiful. For example the standard (and sometimes boring) II-V-I cadence G7 - C7 - F gets transformed into something wonderful if the C7 chord is replaced with a chord based on its Tritone - such as F#13. Ask any jazz pianist for an aural demonstration and you'll see what I mean.
Tony Jackson, London, UK
At the risk of being labelled a music anorak, there's one thing far more common in a lot of popular music (and almost everything written by Wagner and co), and that's the diminished seventh (C - E flat - F# - A). The odd thing is that this is composed of two tritones. Spooky eh?
Peter, Newbury, UK
It's a classic blues sound - at first hidden in the dominant 7th chord used in most blues turn-arounds. Players like Hendrix (e.g. intro to Red House), BB King (e.g. Live at the Regal), etc. brought it out into the open. I like using it because it gets me out of sounding too melodic. I admit that it's not that easy to fit into the worship music that I play at church. Perhaps there's a reason I hadn't thought of before...
Andy Harris, Washington, DC
There is a tritone present in every dominant chord in music - and dominant chords crop up in all musical genres, from nursery rhymes to grand opera. So the tritone is everywhere in music harmony - proving that the devil has all the best tunes!
David Mead, Bath
This is not a coincidence. The esoteric school of Pythagoras taught that certain sounds can trigger different states of mind. In later centuries, the church knew this (scripts still locked in the Vatican) and tried to make illegal all the sounds that could bring sexual, joyful, sensual or other feelings.
Elias Kostopoulos, Athens, Greece
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 29, 2006 11:30 PM
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