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Friday, May 24, 2002 |
American Specatator: The Cyberspace Cowboy: John Perry Barlow. There isn't a great deal going on that's more important than laying the foundations of the place where practically all commerce-whether social, economic, or political-will be conducted for the next couple of thousand years. We really need to do this right. [Tomalak's Realm]
4:31:50 PM Permalink
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Afraid of the Dark
People are, pretty much, afraid of the dark. Walk around many suburban neighborhoods, and not only are the streets way overlighted, but there's a very annoying tendency to light the walks in their yards, or even illuminate flowers in the front yard. Most people never go outdoors at night, so these lights are pretty useless. I can't see that this makes us much safer than we would be with saner lighting.
At the same time, this obsession with painting the nightime day distances us from nature. How many stars can you see at night? For most of us, the answer is not many. (But most of us never look up anyway.)
The International Dark-Sky Association wants return to us the night sky. Lighting for safety doesn't have to blot out the sky. This group is trying to make it easier for cities to legislate sane lighting. There's not enough here to help the homeowner picking out lighting, but perhaps they can add that.
Usability note: On a Help page on the site, they state, "One of the most common question (sic) we receive in relation to the site is about navigation and finding information." Of course, that should be a big hint that there's something wrong with the site, and that adding a help page is probably not going to fix it. This site does need fixing.
9:36:25 AM Permalink
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Radio's News Feature
My pal Mike has been using Radio to blog, too, and has just gotten started using Radio's News. I've been meaning to mention how much I love it; it's worth the price of Radio itself. I'm subscribed to nearly 100 weblogs & news sources through it, but I can scan them pretty quickly.It's so much more useful than adding something to bookmarks, then having to remember to read them. Whenever I find a new site I'm interested in, I look first to see if has an XML feed. This is the sort of thing that really changes the way I use the web.
9:06:34 AM Permalink
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The Analog Hole
Cory Doctorow writes a terrific article on what Hollywood wants to do to "protect" its content. Others have written about this stuff far more eloquently than I can. I recommend Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas. Here are some key points from Doctorow's piece, but everyone should read the whole thing:
Accordingly, the report calls for a regimen where "watermark detectors would be required in all devices that perform analog to digital conversions." The plan is to embed a "watermark" (a theoretical, invisible mark that can only be detected by special equipment and that can't be removed without damaging the media in which it was embedded) in all copyrighted works. Thereafter, every ADC would be accompanied by a "cop chip" that would sense this watermark's presence and disable certain features depending on the conditions.
This is meant to work like so: You point your camcorder at a movie screen. The magical, theoretical watermark embedded in the film is picked up by the cop-chip, which disables the camcorder's ADC. Your camcorder records nothing but dead air. The mic, sensing a watermark in the film's soundtrack, also shuts itself down.
The objective of a law like this is to make "unauthorized" synonymous with "illegal." In the world of copyright, there are many uses that are legal, even -- especially -- if they are unauthorized, for example, the fair-use right to quote a work for critical purposes. Any critic -- a professor, a reporter, even an individual with a personal website -- may lawfully copy parts of copyrighted works in a critical discussion. Such a person may scan in part of a magazine article, record a snatch of music from a CD or a piece of a film or television show in the lawful course of making a critical work.
The upshot will be restricted communication that is controlled by big businesses, a world where only the huge have freedom of speech, which is so narrowly interpreted as to be of no use to the rest of us. I've said it before, but the world feels more like a Philip K. Dick vision, or something from the dark satire of science fiction of the 50s and 60s.
8:35:20 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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