Crazy Midland Radicals

Here's a link in (I found it Dan Shafer's blog) to an ad placed by Midland, TX residents. They're not exactly known for being crazed left-wing lunatics up there. And neither are the people quoted in the ad. It's a PDF file, but worth the download.
http://www.moveon.org/midland.pdf

7:36:43 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

It's All Software

The recent Lexmark DMCA suit has stirred a hornet's nest in the tech community by coming up with a scheme whereby the DMCA can be employed to compel consumers to buy Lexmark and only Lexmark toner catridges for their Lexmark printers.

In a recent CNet article, an HP executive was critical of this twisting of the intent of the law:

[HP Senior Vice President Pradeep Jotwani:] We think it is stretching it ... The DMCA was put in place (to protect) things like movies, music and software applications.

The only problem is that in a digital world there's no clear line between data (eg, music, movies, Word documents) and programs. See for instance Edward Felton's ongoing discussion on this very topic.

This is the problem with the DMCA. Written by a bunch of clueless hacks feeding out of the trough of their corporate cronies (oh my, I need to settle down), it is blowing the lid off of the Pandora's Box of digital intellectual property and erasing the notion that we as consumers can really own anything (digital) at all.

Since anything can have bits and bytes grafted to it, as with these Lexmark cartridges with their accompanying DMCA-protected chips, anything and everything falls under the umbrella of the DMCA. It's an uberlaw for the digital age. Everything else will be trumped by it.

With a law like this, nothing is safe (including the notion that when you buy a chair you have unlimited rights to sit in it -- satire).

4:40:33 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Why Space?

David Galbraith (linked by Jason Kottke/Undesign) on our doubts about paying for manned space exploration:

[Galbraith:] People complain about costly things such as space exploration and high energy physics experiments. Why spend money on these things when we have issues like poverty?

This argument is nihilistic. Why do we build monuments, paint, make films, write music, when there is still poverty all around? There is enough food in the world; poverty is the result of politics, exploitation and war above all.

Human space exploration is one of our greatest achievements. To try and rationalize unmanned space flight on the grounds of practicality misses the point, it is like saying that the Sistine Chapel would be brighter if it were whitewashed.

As a byproduct, space exploration provides us with expensive toys that are not designed for killing each other.

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That Was Columbia

I went to talk to the kids yesterday, 32 of them or so in Ms. Smith's science class. I went to talk to them about space and about history and about Columbia.

First I filled them with facts. I talked about Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard and John Glenn. I talked about Neil Armstrong bringing his spinning spacecraft under control. I talked about Sputnik and Soyuz and Mercury and Gemini and Apollo. I talked of flight controllers in Houston about to turn blue as Neil Armstrong landed the lunar module on nothing but fumes. And I talked about the Space Shuttle, about Enterprise and Columbia and Challenger and Discovery and Atlantis and Endeavor.

They sat silently as I told them what it was like to be there when Columbia first went up in 1981, what it was like to sit in the stands in black of night waiting for the launch clock to tick down, gazing out across the swamps at the gleaming white jewel of a rocket standing miles away on the horizon.

They sat in silence as I described to them the noiseless clouds of billowing smoke at the pad as the clock started counting up and how the Earth shook under our feet microseconds later. They sat in silence as I described the roar of the solid rocket boosters that hit us, how it sounded like the very air was being torn apart. They sat in silence as I described to them the color of the flame, gleaming liquid orange underneath the rocket's ascent.

That was Columbia, I told them, nine years before any of you were born. And I looked down at the scribbled notes I had brought with me, and I swallowed hard and struggled for a moment to find the next words to say.

That was Columbia. And they sat silently waiting for me.

I took a piece of black and white silica tile to the class to show to them. It was a sample piece of Shuttle tile that they gave us in the press room in 1981. I took it with me and passed it around, to let them feel it, to let them hold it.

And when the bell rang and it was time to go, the kids reached down and got their books. A few stuck around to touch the tile again. And Ben came to the front and gave me a big hug from behind.

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Sixth grade science class, Small Middle School, Austin TX
8:07:52 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []