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Updated 92 Days ago
Rage Rocks The Boat
True to their band’s name, members of Rage Against the Machine (RATM) managed to rock the boat (get it? “rock”) at the Republican National Convention yesterday in lovely St. Paul, MN. Normally, we at ToastedRav tend to avoid politics because, frankly, we’re intellectually above such topics, as evidenced by this video. However, when a “stick it to the man” band like RATM makes some noise, it’s worth mentioning because they’re just so creative with their expression (see here and here.) Plus, let’s face it, of ALL the political rap metal bands out there, they’re the best one (sorry Speak Ill of Filibusters.)
Rage frontman Zack de la Rocha delivers helpful
beard grooming tips to the crowd prior to playing a protest concert
Anyway, not long ago, RATM lead singer Zack de la Rocha promised a stunt that’d make news during the RNC and he delivered on that promise. The group showed up unannounced at the State Capitol lawn to play an impromptu concert in protest of America’s two party system, the Iraq War, etc. Though police banned them from playing since they weren’t listed on the permit, Zack and crew grabbed a bullhorn and brought the funk a cappella style to a crowd of about 4,000, then led a march to the Xcel Energy Center, site of the convention. Though the march ended semi-peacefully (minus a little teargas and about a dozen arrests,) the group managed to make headlines worldwide for the second time in less than a month (they’re equal opportunity ragers, after all.) Read more about it here and click the Video tab to watch an earlier example of Rage’s rage, a music video directed by Michael Moore that managed to shut down Wall Street for a few hours. No matter which side of the fence you choose, you gotta admit it’s entertaining to watch these guys.
About The Author:
Chris Files is a video producer and writer for ToastedRav.com as well as a world-champion moose caller*Story idea? Drop a line to chris@toastedrav.com
*1998 Winter Olympic Games - Nagano, Japan
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But this article makes me feel a little better about them:
http://www.5280.com/blog/?p=3417
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.