Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Goodbye, Evan and Zora! (We mean it this time). An unfortunate final "Joe Millionaire" offers one last opportunity to marvel at our heroes, and their remarkable lack of chemistry. [Salon.com] 4:35:23 PM    comment []

John Perry Barlow on Dick Cheney, brinkmanship in Iraq, and the coming Pax Americana (thanks, Interesting People and Daypop Top 40!) How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? 4:34:29 PM    comment []

Adam Curry pointed at A music industry case study, in the New York Daily News. Imagine a new, hot band -- capable of leveraging a higher royalty rate than typical for new acts -- with a gold-record debut album. (We're told that only 128 of more than 30,000 records reached that level in 2002.) That record would gross $8,490,000. Work the numbers. The four guys in the band end up making about the same as a city sanitation worker with two years' experience, without health benefits, vacation and retirement fund. But with, of course, groupies. 11:00:37 AM    comment []

Loads of good stuff today on Scripting News, in fact. 10:51:12 AM    comment []

News.Com: Blogging Comes to Harvard. [Scripting News] 10:31:38 AM    comment []

Following on yesterday's story about his speech at Duke, here's Valenti denounces file-sharing, by Alex Garinger, The Chronicle (Duke U). [Jack] Valenti, president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, called upon universities to develop a code of conduct for their Internet-using students and argued for a moral imperative to stop file-swapping during the third annual Meredith and Kip Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property at the School of Law Monday. . . . The newspaper is full of sordid stories of the unbounded avarice of a lot of corporate executives, Valenti said. These executives knew they were cheating and stealing from their employees and stockholders.... [File-downloaders] are doing the same thing. . . . Law students in attendance engaged in a lively debate with Valenti following his lecture, posing pointed questions and attempting to find possible loopholes in the illegality of copying digital material. Valenti remained stalwart in opposition to file-downloading. He says a lot of funny things, but he is pretty obnoxious and sort of a one-note Johnny, said second-year law student Kimberly Klimczuk after the event. When someone brings up a legitimate concern, he goes off on a rant as to why it is stealing. I refer Mr. Valenti to my earlier remarks about the ethics of the industry he represents. Plagiarism and phony accounting certainly make this a pot-kettle situation at best. But since the story is not so simple as "download=theft," even that bit of (im)moral equivalence falls short. 9:42:18 AM    comment []

Teacher in Space Is Still in NASA's Plans [New York Times: Technology] 7:24:00 AM    comment []

In Web disputes, U.S. law rules the world, by Micahel Geist, in the Toronto Star. (Available directly in case the shorl url in the hyperlink expires.) 3:17:11 AM    comment []