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 Saturday, December 14, 2002
ElcomSoft Jury Asks for Law Text. There's no verdict yet in the trial of Russian softare maker ElcomSoft for criminal violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Instead, jurors request a copy of the law -- all 100-plus pages of it. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
Just think, you can be accused and charged with a crime in a foreign country for something that is perfectly legal in yours. When Australian courts said the same premise applied to American articles published on the web, allowing Australian citizens to sue for libel for things that are not libelous in the US, American publishers rose up and said it was the end of the world. It will take some time for the legal ramifications of all this stuff to make it thorugh. In the meantime, there will be some really unfair things happening and some really outrageous legal decisions. 10:54:14 PM 
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Scientists Don't Read the Papers They Cite [Slashdot]
The New Scientist continues to be the scientific tabloid of choice. First of all a 1973 paper is most likely not in any database. So you have two choices, to type out the citation yourself or cut-and-paste the citation from another source that very well may be in the correct digital format. Most people will take the cut-and-paste because it is easier. This article deomsnstrates the huge leaps in logic that some people take when looking at statistical measures. I would like to know what years the errors occurred and which were most often copied. Were the errors propagated by the same autors and groups who were simply cut-and pasting damaged references from their own work? Why not see what happens with more recent ones where everything is in the digital realm? There are all sorts of problems with this report. As far as I can see, it was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. I wonder how the reporter found out about it. 10:51:17 PM
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Keeping Track of John Poindexter. Online pranksters have turned the tables on the man behind the government's controversial Total Information Awareness effort. They are posting his personal information on hundreds of sites. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News]
How long before this is declared illegal? As David Brin says, the best way to insure accountability of our elected officials is to be able to use the same snooping tools against them. The problem with the government collecting this data does not come from some amorphous 'bad' government but from unethical, immoral people using this information for their own purposes, to the detriment of us all. Considering that John Poindexter is running this thing, we may not have to look far. He has shown himself perfectly capable of doing things that many of us consider unethical, immoral and downright anti-American. 10:50:27 PM
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Bioinformatics in The Economist [Slashdot]
At the end of the day, bioinformatics, computational biology and proteomics MUST provide new information about the world around us. They are tools that will help us but, like the tools of molecular biology, their importantce will come from the results they yield. 10:26:08 PM
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To Save the Forest, The Trees Must Go. The forest service has proposed the logging of half a million acres in the Sierra Nevada to see how it will affect the habitat of the spotted owl and the ferocity of forest fires. By John H. Cushman Jr.. [New York Times: Science]
Of course, the most expensive trees are the ones slated to be culled. Somehow a nine-foot diameter old growth tree is a greater fire hazard than younger trees. And of course, trees have to be cut so that roads can be built to cut the trees. This should be a wonderful experiement. I bet the reports are already written detailing how reducing the canopy from the 60-90% range to the 40-50% has had no effect on the animal population. As if you could really see this in 1 year. 10:13:59 PM
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A First Step to Cutting Reliance on Oil. Fuel cells could ease the threat of global warming without taking away freedom and mobility. By Tom Redburn. [New York Times: Science]
Fuel cells will be a big part of our economy. Why not make it sooner rather than later? Why not take a small portion of the billions we are spending to fight a war whose origins spring from oil to make this happen? 10:05:24 PM
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I, Cringely | The Pulpit [Daypop Top 40]
My parenbts would probably be able to comment on the economics of records in 1948 but it makes a compelling story. The main difference between corporations in the '40s and today may be the extremely cozy relationship between coporations and government, particularly when it comes to government intervention to preserve a business model. People want good digital material at a decent price. Most people will do the right thing. I kind of like Cringely's model. Music always depended on the public performance first long before the WWII. Maybe we need to get back to this. The main problem is that current concert tickets are even more overpriced that LPs woth many running $80 or more. Plus, you will still have bootlegs of the concerts to deal with. These should be easy to deal with by providing extra value to the CDs. DVDs became a big hit mainly because they offered more goodies that video tapes. Do the same things with CDs vs. bootlegs. People will want to buy the CD or DVD in order to relive the concert. A very interesting idea. 9:49:26 PM
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"Bush Administration cuts home heating grants, in the dead of winter " [Daypop Top 40]
This is the problem when people say they want smaller government. Programs to help people disappear or get slashed. Money to provide heating costs for those without the means will be lost for 500,000 people this winter. At a time where there are more people out of work than last year and the start of a colder winter. Let's talk about cutting the money right as we go into winter. That's a good PR move.I am sure that saving $300 million will be very useful for a government running a deficit of $160 BILLION. This is without paying for a war. I expect Bush to perform a similar move as he did with unemployment benefits. These got stalled in the last Congress because he did not want the Democrats to get ANY credit. Now that we are going to have a Republican Congress, he wants them to attack unemployment first. NIce to let us know now. And, of course, I expect this to be the least beneficial version. In the meantime, many thousands of people have seen their unemployment benefits disappear. What a compassionate guy! He could now come out and say that he is raising heating benefits by $300 million from the proposed budget that he himself made. This is a pretty standard political trick. 9:31:33 PM
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The Year 2002 in Quotes.
"In a year awash with scandal and a steady stream of layoffs as the economy continued to stagger, we could take comfort in the certainty that fellows like Oracle Chief Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy would amuse us with their comments. We scribbled down what they, and various others, had to say and offer this quote retrospective." [InfoWorld: Top News] [The Shifted Librarian]
I love this quote from Scott McNealy the leader of Sun Microsystems: I wish our customers had more money. Don't we all! 8:55:36 PM
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