Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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How to solve the copyright distribution issue – the practical approach
I really dig the way in which Richard Stallman has approached the problems inherent in copyright, but they aren’t very practical – a little too idealistic and abstract for a bunch of greedy MBAs and CEOs to deal with. Andrew Orlowski gave this address, titled, After Grokster: why (almost) everything we’re told about P2P is…
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British man sacked for having opinion
Happy Independence Day. Take a moment to be glad you aren’t Alex Hanff, a British software developer who the Register is reporting was sacked for having opinion by his new employer, Aldcliffe Computer Systems. The gist is that he was asked to appear on an evening news talk show after the announcement of the U.…
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the end times are here
It is 10pm Pacific, Saturday July 2nd, and NBC is showing NASCAR in Primetime.
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Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
This article – Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders – talks about the issue of organizing filesystems for human interfaces, specifically it talks about the difference between Microsoft’s desktop and Google’s search paradigms. It seems to me that the search paradigm, especially when used in this context to replace hierarchy, is…
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a glimpse of the future?
Since the Supreme Court ruled ambiguously on Monday in the MGM v Grokster case the motives of software designers and programmers are now probative in pursuing civil and criminal actions involving copyright law. This story – Wired News: BitTorrent Whiz Extolled Piracy? [ archive.org ] – is about a manifesto once published on the web…
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O’Connor’s retirement inopportune for moderates
The LA Times is reporting that Justice O’Connor, Supreme Court’s First Woman, Is Retiring. At a time when most eyes were on the Chief Justice, this is a bit of a surprise. It is also a blow to moderates as O’Connor has been a swing vote on many divisive issues during her term. She was…
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Nationalism in Cyberspace
In a story titled “Bush administration annexes internet,” The Register talks about how the U. S. Department of Commerce intends to “retain control over the Internet’s root servers indefinitely.” This is a reversal of previous U. S. and may in some way be a response to U. N. attempts to control the internet. What is…
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“Army recruits shortfall blamed on Iraq war critics”
This is a Yahoo story, which means it will be gone in an hour or so, but the gist of it is that the Pentagon and some Congressmen are blaming people who call the war a mistake, and media types who only show the bad side of the war for the failure of the Army…
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and so it begins…
So much for “don’t be evil” – this guy [ link dead, no archive ] got locked out of Gmail because he uses Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension that lets him add content and functionality to web pages that isn’t provided by the authors. In a world governed by contracts – like ULAs and SLAs…
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A New Film Release Paradigm
Film Movement is a DVD-of-the-month club that releases independent films on DVD to members the same date they are released in the art house circuit. It costs $20 a month or $160 for a year, the DVDs are yours to keep, and shipping is free. This is, to me, as clever as CD Baby, and…