Friday, March 29, 2002
Intel forces yoga group to fight for its name
Mark Stephens is trying to stay calm. He's taking deep breaths. He's meditating. But it isn't easy keeping cool when you've angered the biggest semiconductor company in the world.
Discussion at Slashdot.
Some Myths About Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is a hot-button issue these days, and for good reason. In the heat of debate, however, it can become easy for dogmatic assertions to stamp out complex truths. In order to fairly consider intellectual property, it is important that our discussions not be clouded by misconceptions; for this reason, a number of false statements about intellectual property are here listed and rebutted.
Yahoo Knows Best
Jeremy Bowers
A practical note today: For everyone who has an account with Yahoo, the bastards have reset your marketing preferences to "I beg you to deluge me with crap, including by phone and snail mail".
radio.macros.recentTitledBlogPosts
Dave Winer
You can include this macro on the home page of your weblog, or on the home page of a category. Alan Reiter asked for the feature, and I've seen other people attempt to make this work. It's time to get the functionality into the product.
Cool! I don't like having the dates, though, so I set flIncludeWhen:false.
U.S. prepares to invade your hard drive
Paul Boutin
A bill before Congress would mandate built-in copy-protection on all digital devices. But even technology experts who really want to protect intellectual property think it's a lousy idea.
Dave Winer
BTW, in case it isn't clear — a legal system where fax machines must call the government to get approval to send a document is a very bad idea. It reeks of the Soviet Union or the repression that people in China have to deal with. It's not only bad technology (it'll never scale) it's also bad period. The framers of the US Constitition envisioned something like this and gave the people the power to overthrow the government. I hope we will not go quietly into this future.
Towers Withstood Impact, but Fell to Fire, Report Says
James Glanz and Eric Lipton
As was obvious to television viewers worldwide, the towers sustained the initial impact of the planes. But the buildings were able to redistribute loads away from damaged columns so well that they could probably have remained standing indefinitely if not for the fires, an earthquake or a windstorm, the report said.
Homeland Security: Time to sweep aside some euphemisms
Vin Suprynowicz at Sierra Times
If Gov. Ridge's position is little more than that of a gussied-up presidential speechwriter or adviser, why was it created with so much ballyhoo following the assaults of last Sept. 11?
Stop Policeware
Fight the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)
Another Punch for Copy Protection
Declan McCullagh
A freshman congressman from the entertainment capital of the world is about to introduce a bill that would help quicken the passage of Sen. Fritz Hollings' digital copy-protection bill.
Probing the Alien Artist's Mind
Noah Shachtman
H.R. Giger's vision has been skewed since the day he reluctantly emerged from the womb. His scary character from the film Alien is only the most known of his disturbing images.
Matt Goyer
Let's get this rolling. These arepro digital consumersenators. If you feel this list is incorrect or have additions then please email me or leave a comment.
- Senator Patrick Leahy (D - Vermont)
- Senator Orrin Hatch (R - Utah)
- Senator Maria Cantwell (D - Washington)
Jenny Levine
Plus Representative Rick Boucher (D - Virginia).
A Semantic Blog
Peter Harbeson
So why bother? Bootstrapping! The Semantic Web will start to exist when enough resources (RDF-speak for "things you can connect to on the web") include semantic information.
Wile E. Coyote Sues the Acme Corporation for Defective Products
Jenny Levine
Okay, so I'm probably the last person on the planet to see this, but it made me laugh.
NewsInEssence: Web-based News Summarization
A team of researchers at the University of Michigan has developed NewsInEssence, a free, Web-based service that automates the collection of multiple, related news stories concerning a given event that users selects.
Patents Pending
- A Method for Persuading Others of the Worthiness of a Particular Item
- A Method for Removing Debt by Distributed Interlocking Partnerships
Dave Winer
Glenn Fleishman says pfui to the NY Times theory that the Web has become boring. I concur. Here's how the essay for my Long Bet begins. "As with personal computing, the early days of Web publishing belonged to the hobbyists, reveling that it worked at all. But the Web is maturing, the tools are getting easy, as the understanding of the technology has become widespread". Glenn Davis says that the gee-whiz hello-world days are over. It's true it was fun (for a few minutes) to watch a fish tank on a webcam. But that was not the promise or purpose of the Web. Maybe Davis thought that's what it was. If so, he missed the point. It's about publishing without the middlemen.
Dave Winer
I got an email from John Gapper, the editor of the op-ed page of the Financial Times in response to one of my many observations about the Eisner essay. I said "We fully understand that [Eisner is] lying about protecting the interests of creative people. That the FT let him do this in their esteemed journal says something (not sure what)". Gapper explains. "I think all it says is that we think the debate about Internet copyright is a vital one, and we like well-written and pithy pieces on the subject that excite comment and interest, which this one clearly did. We have also carried a couple of other articles by Lawrence Lessig and we hope to keep following the topic". Accepted. If I the Eisner essay had landed on my desk I would have run it too.
Ingo Rammer
All the aggregator posts for which I don't have the time to read them (at the instant I see them) get posted to a "must read" category that's not upstreamed.
This sounds like a good idea.
Later I created a "Queued" category for stuff I haven't processed yet, but don't want to lose. I can't figure out how to turn off upstreaming for a specific folder (a directive in #prefs.txt?), but I'm not posting the queued stories to the home page or rendering them in html, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Later++ So now I have all these interesting stories, but no easy way to go through them! Specifically, I would like to have a category specific page where I can edit posts in that category only. Perhaps this is available already? I'll keep diggin'...
