Thursday, July 03, 2003

Freedom isn't free. Celebrate Independence Day by subscribing to independent Salon, from Joan Walsh, V.P. of News, Salon.com: This July 4, take a moment to remember what Independence Day means, and then support independent media by subscribing to Salon Premium if you haven't yet. Or give a Fourth of July gift subscription to a friend. The letter also warns of an upcoming price increase, noting that this is a good time to convert from daypass to subscription for that reason. Also: For those subscribers at the $30 level, we just added the ability to read full-text Salon articles on their cellphones or PDAs. We also added a one-year subscription to Wired magazine, which you'd pay $12 to subscribe to separately. They join other great benefits like free bestselling audiobook downloads, magazine subscriptions to Utne and Mother Jones, and more. The full list of benefits. 11:18:04 PM    comment []

DIGITAL SHOPLIFTING; AUTHORS AS HUMANS; A CALL FOR CORRECTIONS. STREET CONTINUES TO FIND USES FOR CAMERA-PHONES This is one of those things that so perfectly demonstrates how older media (fashion magazines, in this case) and their previously unexamined business models can dissolve on contact with new media . . . . [Gibson Blog] 10:22:32 PM    comment []

Bob Frankston: Hotspots Cold Cells. The current telecommunications infrastructure has one overriding purpose -- to generate billable events. It is a tragic mistake to assume that this is the only way we can pay for vital infrastructure since it is an extremely inefficient and dysfunctional system that extracts an unbearable cost on society. [Tomalak's Realm] 9:48:29 PM    comment []

economic substance. The great thing about the early stages of a presidential campaign is that the candidate and campaign have time to put together real messages of substance. This speech by Edwards on economic policy is a perfect example of this contribution of substance. It is extraordinarily good. [Lessig Blog] 6:34:22 PM    comment []

how cc works. There's a great example of how Creative Commons works on its blog. A clip: "About a month after submitting a few acoustic guitar tracks to Opsound's sound pool [and thus releasing the song under an Attribution-ShareAlike license], I got an email from a violinist named Cora Beth, who had added a violin track to one of the guitar tracks..." This is getting very cool. [Lessig Blog] 5:36:18 PM    comment []

I just came across my earlier blinking of The Personal Server -- research at Intel. The idea is that I would have a device -- basically a hard drive that runs a Web server, with wireless connections -- that travels with me, giving me effective access to my computer by way of wireless desktops, kiosks, phones, or PDAs. It would be small, wouldn't have to be connected to anything for it to do its work, and would carry all my stuff and present it the way I'm used to seeing it and allow me to interact with it however I want. This is awesome, and I want it, soon. See also the Interview with Roy Want, a Principal Engineer at Intel, a member of Intel Research/CTG, and leader of the Ubiquity Strategic Research Project (SRP). 3:16:56 PM    comment []

Protecting Its Proprietary Pork: Hormel Files Complaints Against Software Firm Spam Arrest. By Jonathan Krim, Washington Post. In a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Hormel argued that it has engendered substantial goodwill and good reputation in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products that would be damaged by Spam Arrest's use of the term. The company added that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles that of its lunch meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products. . . . Trademark lawyers were skeptical that Hormel could prevail. The problem that Hormel has is that the word has come to have a different meaning and has become adopted so widely that it is going to be difficult if not impossible for Hormel to prevail, said John W. Caldwell, a Philadelphia patent and trademark lawyer. 3:16:52 PM    comment []

Twenty-eight years ago tonight I returned to the U.S. from Iran, just in time to celebrate Independence Day here. In commemoration, here are Last month's list of Persian blogs on the scene and in English. Also, last month's Almost the complete list of Iranians who blog in English. (I'll look to port the lists sometime soon.) 3:16:48 PM    comment []

Last year on t'other blog, Again with the tooth fairy: Web gives a voice to Iranian women First Internet cafes to open in Kabul Girls with views of nature have better chance of success At-risk inner-city girls who see nature through the windows of their homes may have a better chance for success than those girls whose views are not as green, say scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hoaxing Yourself: Stories of people who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else does. Faculty Development That Works Don't Tell Julia Child: Integrating Functional Skills Into Web Courses suggests a model of how instructional technology can be adapted to the specific demands of job training courses Kevin Mitnick update Spam King Living High In The Bayou If it accepts e-mail, there's a way in, he says. And this is designed to get around anything. Nicodemo Scarfo update: Mafia boss jailed in FBI keyboard bugging case Systematic Pattern Of Rainfall Across U.S. Discovered, and Loquendo, an amazing text-to-speech software and platform 1:16:34 PM    comment []

News in the Lexmark case: Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Printer Cartridge Co., Opposes Printer Manufacturer's Broad Copyright Claims Whether you like or hate the controversial DMCA, Congress never intended the law to shield printer manufacturers from competition in toner cartridges, said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. The Lexmark lawsuit shows how far copyright law has strayed from its original foundations, that is, 'to promote progress of science and useful arts.' Here, also, the EFF amicus brief in Lexmark v. Static Control EFF Lexmark v. Static Control archive EFF Reply Comments to Copyright Office, supporting Static Control (Adobe PDF file) other coverage of the case here at A blog doesn't need a clever name. 1:16:30 PM    comment []

UglyDress.com is the archive of the world's worst Bridesmaids dresses. 12:16:24 PM    comment []

GIF patent expires One of the more controversial internet patents is no more in the US, at least. On Friday, the patent underlying the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) expired in the US, to the relief of makers of image editing applications. The patent will not expire in Europe, Canada and Japan until June next year. CompuServe designed the GIF software in 1987, using Lempel-Zev-Welch (LZW) compression technology subsequently patented by Unisys Corporation. In 1994, Unisys and CompuServe reached a licensing agreement for the technology, and Unisys announced that it would start to collect royalties on its patent. This did not go down well within the industry, as GIFs were a popular way of storing and sending graphics files - and no royalties had previously been required. 11:16:21 AM    comment []

R.I.P., G H von Wright (Telegraph obit). Von Wright was often associated with the so-called Vienna School of logical positivists, whose members included Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick and Karl Popper. He acknowledged that, as an adolescent, he had been a "positivist of a sort", yet he never shared their belief in progress through the advancement of science or diffusion of knowledge. Instead, influenced by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, he took a more pessimistic view. Like Spengler, von Wright believed that the western cultural cycle had reached its height and had started to decline. Art had become "experimental"; old and new superstitions and irrational notions were coming to the fore; democracy was being undermined by "technical imperialism"; and the culture of the body had begun to take the place of spiritual values. He sought a return to a more humanistic tradition in which the rational faculty of man is seen as more than an instrument of scientific and technological fundamentalism, but embraces an ethical and cultural dimension. His public pleas for peace, human rights and tolerance made him one of the most respected intellectuals in Scandinavia. . . . In 1934 he entered the University of Helsinki to study under the philosopher and psychologist Eino Kaila, who had been an associate member of the Vienna School. Von Wright became fascinated by logical positivism, but was also influenced by humanist writers such as Jacob Burkhardt. It was at Helsinki that he first encountered the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Indeed, after reading an exam essay by von Wright on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kaila remarked that he now understood the work better, although his pupil later confessed that perhaps neither of them had really understood it. After graduating in 1937, von Wright travelled to Italy and Austria, hoping to study for a doctorate in Vienna. But the Anschluss of March 1938 made this impossible, and he moved instead to Cambridge (having taught himself English by reading J M Keynes's Treatise on Probability) to study under C D Broad. Surprisingly, given his interest in Wittgenstein, von Wright initially had no idea that the philosopher was teaching at Cambridge. When he found out, late in his first term, he immediately attended one of Wittgenstein's lectures and introduced himself, only to be ticked off angrily by Wittgenstein for turning up in the middle of his course. . . . By 1948, when von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, the two men had become close friends. A synopsis of the correspondence between them was first published in the Cambridge Review in 1983. . . . In 1951 he published three important works. In An Essay in Modal Logic he contributed to the formalisation of the logic of possibility and necessity, a branch of the discipline that had been almost unexplored since the Middle Ages. In A Treatise on Induction and Probability, he developed theories of eliminative induction propounded by Francis Bacon and J S Mill. An article on "Deontic Logic" in the journal Mind marked him out as the founder of a new discipline concerned with the study of the logical relationships among propositions that assert that certain actions or states of affairs are morally obligatory, morally permissible, morally right or morally wrong. . . . He wrote about the Vietnam War and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, using them as examples to question the optimistic belief in the omnipotence of science and the inevitability of progress. He also published studies on Jaeger, Spengler, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy - he regarded Anna Karenina as the most profound aesthetic experience in literature. Explanation and Understanding (1971), perhaps von Wright's best-known book, showed the influence of Wittgenstein, but marked a clean break with the positivism of his youth. He suggested that human action could not be explained causally by scientific or "natural" laws, but had to be understood "intentionally" - a concept connected with wants and beliefs developed in a social and cultural context. 11:16:15 AM    comment []

Diary: Laura Lippman (Slate). Makes you feel good, doesn't it, a regular challenged me earlier this year. No, that's not the reason. I'm not there to feel saintly. Other volunteers have asked if I'm researching a novel. That's not it either. I do this because it's tangible, because a day spent making 1,200 sandwiches is a day without existential dilemmas. Brendan and Willa have been feeding people in Southwest Baltimore for 35 years, and they can go another 35 without the likes of me. But on Thursdays, I'm glad to have something besides a word count to show for my day. 9:15:52 AM    comment []

Billboard tracks Net music downloads. The magazine is charting new territory this week, adding data for the first time on sales of Internet music downloads to its lists of top-selling albums. [CNET News.com] 7:32:43 AM    comment []

Bush's Record on Jobs: Risking Comparison to a Republican Ghost. George W. Bush finds himself in danger of becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a decline in the country's employment. By David Leonhardt. [New York Times: Business] 7:29:33 AM    comment []

Libraries Planning a Meeting on Filters. Officials plan to meet with makers of Internet filtering software next month to voice concern over a law that requires libraries and schools to use Internet filters. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology] 7:26:50 AM    comment []

Vmyths Hovering at Death's Door. Vmyths has proven invaluable in helping to debunk the many virus rumors that its founder says are encouraged by the security industry that capitalizes on them. But now the watchdog website may be about to go under, a victim of its own high standards. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 7:19:00 AM    comment []

I'm cleaning out and coming across interesting items on paper from whiles back, including How do game developers hack it? All-nighters, 18-hour days, sleeping at the office -- John Romero's posse keeps up a "death schedule" to get Daikatana out of beta. By David Kushner, in Salon (2000). 3:14:00 AM    comment []

News from Canada: Senate's doing one of the most ambitious media studies in history. By Molly Amoli K. Shinhat, The Hill Times. Our principle focus is to see whether and if so how public policy needs to change in order help to ensure that Canadian media remains healthy and diverse and independent, says Quebec Liberal Senator Joan Fraser, chair of the Senate's Transport and Communications Committee's media study. In its own right, that's a pretty big challenge even though all we're looking at is public policy. Launched in late April, the 12-member committee hopes to wrap up in spring 2004. But the media's radical metamorphosis in the last 30 years which includes globalization, technological change (i.e. the internet and all-news cable channels), concentration of ownership, convergence and the media's ever-changing role, rights and responsibilities -- all fall within the study area. It is a gargantuan set of issues and possibly the most ambitious Senate media study ever attempted, partially because the mandate covers communication in all forms -- "radio, telephone, telegraph, wire, cable, microwave, wireless, television, satellite, broadcasting, post or any other means, method or form." It also covers two prominent and hotly-debated policy voids -- cross ownership or convergence and the internet. If you want to have a free press, Sen. Fraser says, Then that free press has to be able to support itself. . . . Using the internet as an excuse for inaction, is problematic, Mr. [Russell] Mills [former publisher of the Ottawa Citizen] said, since there is no evidence that people spend significantly more time on-line just because the internet's richness is available. Aside from exceptional circumstances like the invasion of Iraq, a typical educated Canadian will spend about half an hour to three quarters of an hour a day with the news, he said. John Urquhart, executive director of the Council of Canadians, contests the notion that media markets -- and producers -- exist independently. The market exists really -- and always has existed -- through public policy, through political policy, Mr. Urquhart says. We would not have a CBC today, if it were not for political policy. We would have just a chain of private stations and probably all of them American owned. The whole purpose of the media is frankly, in a real sense, to be liberal. In order for it to have any kind of credibility in a democracy, it has to represent other voices at some level. And so the question then is, are you doing an adequate job of it? 3:13:55 AM    comment []