Is there a "best of email," or a "best of websites"? Neither of these make much sense, because the point of web sites is to read the ones your interested in, and the point of email is to communicate with the people you know. Likewise, the point of Twitter is to follow people you are interested in and/or know. If you don't know of anyone who is of interest to you who uses Twitter, there's not much point in you using it, just as it would be pointless to use email if you didn't know anyone else who used email.

It's really unfortunate that Twitter forces you to follow 10,000 people who post about shoes and shitting. It would be so much more useful if it let you choose whose tweets you read.

Grooveshark's business model appears to be based on blatantly infringing copyright, then hoping they can negotiate deals with the record labels. Google Music is based on doing something that probably isn't copyright infringement (although the RIAA may disagree), backed up by Google's lawyers. I like Grooveshark, but I don't know that it's going to be around for very long.

There's nothing in oAuth that requires that the key be secret, indeed, I think the oAuth spec specifically discourages depending on the oAuth key as a reliable indicator of the application, precisely because there's no real way to keep it secret. It's companies like Twitter, who insist on uses the obviously not secret oAuth key as if it were secret, that are doing it wrong.

You're talking about jazz here, an art form that is build around the continual re-interpretation of standards. If the jazz tradition doesn't prove that "rehashes, reshaping of others" is creative, I don't know what does.

This confused me two, but I can think of a reason why he might have thought there was a difference. With music, you have both composition and performance rights - chiptune versions of Miles Davis songs are, I guess, much like any other cover version, in that they are derivative works of the composition, but not of the original performance. Perhaps the musician here thought that a photo was like a performance, with no equivalent to the composition rights, so that a re-creation of the same (or a similar) image wouldn't be subject to copyright, where a copy of the actual photograph itself would be.

Because sharing is better than not sharing. There's no inconsistency. If someone thinks that the best situation would be one in which sharing was enforced in all cases, it's perfectly consistent for them to both advocate a legal framework that enforces sharing in some cases (the GPL), and to condemn legal situations that prevent sharing (restrictive copyright licenses). The position you are calling inconsistent just says "we think some restrictions are good and should be enforced, and other restrictions are bad and should not be enforced." Treating different things differently isn't inconsistent.

Social security is paid for specifically out of the social security trust fund, which currently has a surplus. Social security has nothing to do with the deficit.

No they don't. If people believe that information should be shared, it's perfectly consistent to support uses of copyright law that require sharing, while opposing uses of copyright law that don't require sharing.

I think any post referencing Thomas Friedman requires a link to Matt Taibbi's classic article:

It does, yes. Instead, you get to vote with your vote.