Tuesday, May 7, 2002
Pilots vs. Bureaucrats
Ron Paul
It is ludicrous to believe that men and women with the skills, temperament, and judgment to fly incredibly complex planes cannot be trusted with simple handguns — and also highly insulting to professional pilots. The arguments about bullets piercing the fuselage are silly, because small bullet holes clearly are less of a worry than a takeover of the flight deck by terrorists!
Another DMCA Attack Looms
Declan McCullagh
Rep. Rick Boucher is finally ready to try and dismantle a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain "fair uses" of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology.
Discussion at Slashdot.
Jaguar: Mac OS X Prepares to Pounce
Also new in Finder windows is instant searching via a Toolbar Search field into which you can enter file names or text in a document; the results are displayed in the Finder window. It promises to be much better than today's glacial searches via Sherlock.
Domain Names: Memorable, Global, Non-political?
Clay Shirky
There are no pure engineering solutions here, because this is not a pure engineering problem. Human interest in names is a deeply wired characteristic, and it creates political and legal issues because names are genuinely important. In the 4 years since its founding, ICANN has moved from being merely unaccountable to being actively anti-democratic, but as reforming or replacing ICANN becomes an urgent problem, we need to face the dilemma implicit in namespaces generally: Memorable, Global, Non-political — pick two.
