Friday, December 20, 2002
Why copyright extension sucks, cont'd
Thank you, Marriott
Sez here Marriott is going w-fi all over the place.
Keeping up with Jer
Jerry Michalski made the Creative Commons party I missed in San Francisco early this week. Ev also helped him get RSS working, so he should be showing up in a lot more ways & places soon.
Message from Michael
Michael Taht, a man on a mission, asked me to post this, which I am:
Joshua, Michael has been smashing glasses in Callahans bar for you. Hear yourself. Hear Billy Joel. I'll be in San Diego Dec 22.
Good luck to both Michael and Josh.
Same piss, new bladder
RageBoy has extended his roster of bloutlets to include Corante. His first opus is Ad Homenem: the sociology of IQ.
It's even dumber than it appears
Markoff & Schwartz in the NY Times:
The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users
The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is foolishness, utter and complete. The benefits we got from the Net will be obliterated by human stupidity, which, if this plan is adopted, will create barriers between people and nations that are as impenetrable as a Prussian bureaucracy.
Speaking of dumb failures, and of the ultimate triumph of cluesomeness over cluelessness, David Williams compares the Elcomsoft acquittal to the battle of Lexington and Concord.
Why I hate computing
Blogging is basically just writing live on the Web. There are lots of upsides to it, as we know. But there's at least one downside: saving stuff. When you're writing for yourself, you save constantly. But when you're writing live, for the world, you don't always want to do that. You might want to wait until you're done with your post before you save it. That's risky.
... as I just found out when I wasted twenty minutes I didn't have answering Eric Norlin's latest volley, point by point. I was up to number 5 out of 6 when something "unexpectedly quit" and I lost it all. C'est le blog.
So I'll summarize: The Net itself isn't a force. It's a place that exerts a variety of forces, — just as the Earth exerts gravity, a magnetic field and tectonic movements underfoot. The Net-caused condition Eric talks about (scarcity) is really about its opposite: abundance. The Net is a place where information can be duplicated and communicated to the frontiers of infinity. The challenge is to find ways of dealing with that.
I submit that creating sovereign identity services — ones which at their base reside with the individual, rather than with well-meaning third parties — is a necessary first step to dealing with the "scarcity problem" the Net creates for some companies and industries. I also think Eric and I agree about that.
Dr. Weinberger has much more on the subject Read it all (Eric's and David's both). Real good shit, there.
Frontiers of rhinoblasty
This morning's coffee-out-the-nose moment arrived with RageBoy's picture of yours truly losing a game of pocket pool, live, on stage.