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Friday, August 16, 2002 |
For Your Subway Enjoyment: Here's a cool idea...put still images on the wall of a subway and sync their illumination with the speed of the passing trains so that they appear to move! I don't know if it will make any money, but it is kinda cool. [ABC News]
11:47:36 PM 
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Palladium: Microsoft's new Palladium initiative is scary as hell. Here's a Crypto-gram article with a lot of meat about waht's in the works.
7:34:37 AM
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Should Geeks Fight Stupid Government Actions? A News.com Declan McCullagh article says "no". His point is that writing letters to your congressman or getting a bunch of other geeks to howl about the latest stupidity has no impact on the lobbyists and powerbrokers in Washington. Sadly, I think he's right about Washington running on a different kind of gas than the Net, but his recommendation that geeks just keep moving faster than the plodding bad guys seems doomed to fail too. In the end, they can always pass laws to require the rich and successful companies to do stupid things or lose their cash (remember Napster?) and walk away with all the cool stuff we produce. What should we do instead then? Well, I think there are a couple of things. One is to refrain from feeding the monster (the John Doerr approach of buying power with cash) by making our feedback to that system PURELY negative. What I mean by that is being a "third rail" which fooling with is likely to get you electrocuted politically. That takes money too, but it doesn't mean paying them off to leave us alone. Second, the participation of the government in the Internet is something we still have control of (I suppose they could make that illegal too) and threatening to stop routing traffic to .gov domains is a threat we could hold out in case of shenanigans.
Public Knowledge wrote a critical reply, but alas without any better ideas I could see. The notion that the politicians just need to understand more so they will respect our rights seems naive to me. The biggest problems has nothing to do with how much they know (in fact, if they knew more they would perhaps be even more dangerous), it's how much they want to use their power to control people via the Net. No amount of education is going to make politicians stop lusting after power, and neither is being their friends and giving them money. The principle we ought to be standing on is that they have no right to tell us what to do with our computers and our networks, and if we could enlist the courts (which for all their other flaws don't seem to generally be as much driven by a power to take things over) to draw some lines against legislative encroachment on our rights. Appealing to the intelligence and good sense of politicians doesn't seem like a profitable way for us to spend our time since it's a game we can't win. I do think we need to fight these stupid things, but not by either joining the game that they control or by trying to educate the bad guys. We ought to develop tools to attack them and make some examples of the bad guys. They might not understand computers, networks, or moral behavior, but they do understand fear and court decisions and I think those are the right tools for this job is we can fashion them quickly enough.
7:19:07 AM
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Patent Office Screws Up Again: In its latest demonstration of lack of competence, the Patent office has granted a patent for using bots as in instant messenger systems. The abundance of obvious prior art doesn't matter if you know nothing about software I suppose. I know that the lawyers getting fat on software patents, and the USPTO (which is getting similarly nourishment) should just stop the insanity. Software patents were a stupid idea ten years ago when they started granting them in substantial numbers and they still are a stupid idea...for people with intellectual property to defend anywa. For power hungry outsiders it's just great though. I guess that's why they wanted to make the rules for us.
6:00:18 AM
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Haddad: MS may give Apple opportunity in corporate market Haddad has a good point here. With Microsoft going back to its old and customer enraging ways, and Apple's (really great!) OS X starting to come into its own there will be an opportunity for Apple (and Linux guys, and IBM among others) to wrestle some control away from Microsoft. We are also seeing something somewhat new here as well which is that computers are starting to reach a point that disk space, quality, processor speed, screen quality, price, networking, office applications, and basic information manipulation applications are reaching a point of diminishing returns. It used to be that if you could get a machine with twice the memory or twice the disk space, or twice the processor speed, there were substantial new things you could do with your computer, and peopel were willing to go through a lot of grief to get there. Coming up, these might matter as much as they once did, and if and when that happens issues of price (hmmm...Linux?) and sleekness/styling/marketing (hmmmm...Apple?) will start mattering a lot more than merely getting from here to there any ugly way possible (hmmmm...yeah!). There are a lot of ways any of these guys could drop the ball, but it will prove to be an interesting game to watch for sure
5:44:06 AM
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The Evils of Software Patents: Dan Bricklin's 1995 paper on why software patents are a bad idea (including a few arguments I had not considered before but that are excellent points).
2:21:58 AM
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Dan Bricklin on Software Patents: Ever wonder why Visicalc was never patented? Now's your chance.
1:34:56 AM
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Changes Afoot in the Resign Process...Apparently For the Worse: In their continuing efforts to wrong-foot those of us who are determined to see full-scale reconstruction at the World Trade Center site,the powers-that-shouldn't-be have, while presumably deferring the promised Lower Manhattan hearing on the entire Phase I plans,now scheduled a series
of hearings in each borough of NYC that deal PRIMARILY with the memorial.I will call tomorrow to clarify whether this is supposed to REPLACE the Phase I hearing,since the six site plans will be presented at the hearings.
Staten Island,August 20th,at the Michael Petrides School Auditorium (715 Ocean Terrace, Sunnyside)
Brooklyn,August 21st,at CUNY's Klitgord Auditorium,250 Jay Street
Bronx,August 22nd,Lehman College Concert Hall,250 Bedford Park Boulevard West
Queens,August 29th [yes,conflicting with the New York One meeting in
Battery Park City] at LaGuardia Community College Performing Arts Center (31-10 Thomson Avenue)
and finally Manhattan,September 5th,at the Pace University Schimmel Center Auditorium(site of the May 23rd hearing),on Spruce Street near Gold Street,downhill from Park Row.
The Queens hearing is at 6:30 PM and the others all at 6:00...all are scheduled to last for three hours.
This information was provided me by Tom Auchterlonie,who spotted it on the website of the anti-rebuilding survivors' group Give Your Voice (www.giveyourvoice.com).
This will give them plenty of time to make promises about the memorial that they will be able to point to afterward as blocking the construction of tall towers, I expect.
I will attend the Manhattan hearing,I expect those of you who are closer to various hearings can attend those instead or in addition...the petition/literature volunteers can perhaps steer sympathetic people to the respective hearings over the next couple of weeks.WE NEED WARM BODIES AT THESE HEARINGS TO PRESENT A NON-MEGA-MEMORIALIST VIEWPOINT!
EVERYBODY,WHEREVER YOU LIVE,send in comments on the site plan options to the addresses given at http://www.put.com/wtc/ ! [Louis Epstein]
12:56:37 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brian Yoder.
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