Will the internet make us free? Or will the flood of information that courses across its networks only serve to enslave us to powerful interests that are emerging online? How will the institutions of the old world - politics, the media corporations - affect the hacker's dream for a new world populated not by passive consumers but by active participants?
In 'The Revolution will be Digitised, ' Heather Brooke reports back from the front lines of the Information War, a shadow world of computer hackers, cypherpunks, encryption experts, whistleblowers and pro-democracy campaigners. She takes us to San Francisco and Boston, where pioneering geeks launch cyber warfare at night
'A highly original, electrifying read' The Times 'A stylish, riveting thriller' Daily Mail 'An assured page-turner ... it combines action and foreign locations with big ideas a la Dan Brown' Sunday Times The US President Thompson has been dreaming of his own death. A repeating nightmare that hounds him night after night that he can't ignore: something tells him it's not just a dream, it feels too real. Thompson's doctor, military psychiatrist Josh Cain, is summoned to a church tower near the White House. He thinks he is there to talk down another suicidal ex-Marine. But the man he finds tells him of a plot to kill Thompson, revealing secrets he can't possibly have known - just seconds before a sniper's bullet takes him out . . . Battles have been fought man to man, then machine to machine, and even in cyberspace. But now there is a different battlefield emerging: human consciousness and the fight for our minds. What readers are saying: 'A classy, intelligent and reflective investigative thriller.' 'A layered plot, engaging characters and a spine chilling ring of truth to the plot, which lured me in and kept me trapped until the final page.' 'A real page turner with plenty of surprises and twists. Great read.' 'THE BEST BOOK THAT I'VE READ ALL YEAR!'
The perfect gift for music fans and anyone fascianated by Woodstock, Barefoot in Babylon is an in-depth look at the making of 1969’s Woodstock Music Festival—one of Rolling Stone’s “50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.” “Mr. Spitz feeds us every riveting detail of the chaos that underscored the festival. It makes for some out-a-sight reading, man.”—The New York Times Book Review Fifty years ago, the Woodstock Music Festival defined a generation. Yet, there was much more than peace and love driving that long weekend the summer of 1969. In Barefoot in Babylon, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Bob Spitz gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Woodstock, from its inception and the incredible musicians that performed to its scandals and the darker side of the peace movement. With a new introduction, as well as maps, set lists, and a breakdown of all the personalities involved, Barefoot in Babylon is a must-read for anyone who was there—or wishes they were.
The case for a smarter “prosumer law” approach to Internet regulation that would better protect online innovation, public safety, and fundamental democratic rights. Internet use has become ubiquitous in the past two decades, but governments, legislators, and their regulatory agencies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet technologies and uses. In this groundbreaking collaboration, regulatory lawyer Christopher Marsden and computer scientist Ian Brown analyze the regulatory shaping of “code”—the technological environment of the Internet—to achieve more economically efficient and socially just regulation. They examine five “hard cases” that illustrate the regulatory crisis: privacy and data protection; copyright and creativity incentives; censorship; social networks and user-generated content; and net neutrality. The authors describe the increasing “multistakeholderization” of Internet governance, in which user groups argue for representation in the closed business-government dialogue, seeking to bring in both rights-based and technologically expert perspectives. Brown and Marsden draw out lessons for better future regulation from the regulatory and interoperability failures illustrated by the five cases. They conclude that governments, users, and better functioning markets need a smarter “prosumer law” approach. Prosumer law would be designed to enhance the competitive production of public goods, including innovation, public safety, and fundamental democratic rights.
In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.
THE FINAL NOVEL IN THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SOOKIE STACKHOUSE SERIES—the inspiration for the HBO® original series True Blood. When a shocking murder rocks the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, psychic cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse learns that she has more than one enemy waiting to get vengeance for the past. Beacuse nothing is ever clear-cut in Bon Temps. What passes for truth is only a convenient lie. What passes for justice is more spilled blood. And what passes for love is never enough...
Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself. A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube. Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language, literacy, or writing.
The PEN New England Award–winning author returns to Egypt, Maine, where revolution is brewing in a rural compound as the twenty-first century approaches. It’s September 1999, and Gordon St. Onge, known as “The Prophet”, presides over his controversial Settlement in rural Maine. It is rumored to be a cult, where his many wives and children live off the land and off the grid. The newest member, fifteen year old Brianna Vandermast, is fired up and ready for change. Forming her own militia, Bree spreads her vision by writing “The Recipe”, an incendiary revolutionary document that winds up in the hands of wealthy elites—including one who is about to have a fateful encounter with Gordon. A chance drinking session during an airport layover brings Gordon together with multinational CEO Bruce Hummer. Bruce hands Gordon a mysterious brass key which has the potential to spark the unrest that is stirring in Egypt, Maine. As word of “The Recipe” spreads, myriad factions from across the country arrive at The Settlement wanting to make Gordon their poster boy. Gordon soon finds himself at the center of an uprising, the consequences of which no one can predict.
To be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.