Monday, October 14, 2002

Dan Gillmor published a nice piece on economic chokeholds yesterday. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4275256.htm Monocultures are well studied in biology and tend to represent instability. Many have talked about the danger of the approach, but the local economic optimizations (such as using the Windows operating system and Office suite) rule the day. I suspect we will all come to realize the stupidity of our ways, but not before huge amounts of damage are inflicted on the economy. Perhaps this needs to be recast as a "homeland security" issue so as to ride that bandwagon. Maybe one should not be invested in any company that has more than 50% of its machines running a dominant operating system. (oddly enough, following that rule would have saved you from the stock market meltdown :)) 5:38:47 AM     If you worry about copyright you are probably following Eldred v. Ashcroft. Lawrence Lessig is a central player in this http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_10.shtml The New York Times is not optimistic http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/technology/14LESS.html 5:38:24 AM     Nancy notes a real find. In the early days of reverse phone books it was possible to add a wild card to a search ... rather than looking up 555-1212 you could look up 555-121*. This utility went away, but it seems to have returned. Use the Verizon pages and substitute an asterix for a missing digit yellow pages: http://yp.superpages.com/rform.phtml?A=&X=&P=&SRC=people: white pages http://wp1.superpages.com/wp/reverse.phtml?SRC= 5:38:04 AM

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