Blacksmythe

For those of you who don’t know, my wife has her own radio show called Chocolate Chats. Last week I was the guest, but tonight she’s going to run a full hour and deal with the black presence in new media. Among her guests will be Craig Nulan (from Mobilepage.net but who also pops up from time to time on various black blogs), Steph Renee of Soul Sanctuary, Jennifer James of Mommy Too Magazine, and Carlos Muhammad of Luv4self publishing.Her show usually goes only a half hour, but she’s going to go for an hour this time out. Should be a fascinating conversation, and one that I think a number of folks out there should be interested in.

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Ok. Here’s what I have. I’ve got a couple of folders with some 30,000 text files.I want to both randomly generate a list of 3,000 of these files.Then I want to somehow automatically take the text files on this list and place them into another file, preferably copying them.I know how to generate a random list using something like Excel, or SPSS, or Stata.What I don’t know how to do is automatically put them into a file as opposed to moving them there manually.Any suggestions?  I’ve got a mac, and I was figuring that maybe automator might work, but I don’t know.

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According to a poll surveying attitudes about movie downloads over 25 million Americans routinely download movies illegally.  What is the solution?  Stiffer penalties?  More protection?

This is a clear example (to me) of the increase in technology outstripping corporate and legislative attempts to deal with it.  Media corporations like Sony have a vested interest in significantly reducing our rights–15 years ago a dvd was yours to do with what you wanted, now a dvd you purchase can (according to some interpretations) not even be copied for one’s own personal use.  And as these corporations have deep pockets and are very well organized it isn’t difficult for them to get legislation at least put on the table.

But at every step of the way the corporations are going to lose out to innovation and ingenuity.  Consumers may take some losses along the way, and to be fair the future is not yet written.  However unless those 25 million came from Detroit, Gary, the “bad part of DC”, Oakland, the old New Orleans, the South Side of Chicago, and Harlem before gentrification, I don’t see this stopping.  Hell, I don’t even see anyone–not even the media corporations–even using the term “criminal” to describe our their behavior.

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