Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Statue of Liberty access to be relaxed [Salon.com] 9:03:14 PM    comment []

Starbucks unveils aggressive growth plan [Salon.com] 8:39:41 PM    comment []

King Tut Red. This week's column includes items on King Tut's wine, how bats tell trees apart and a British warship becoming a reef. By Henry Fountain. [New York Times: Science] 4:04:06 PM    comment []

Free Culture class. Lawrence Solum (who has entered an elite status after Vint Cerf gave a paper praising his Layers Principle paper) is running a blog-class this week on Free Culture. Follow along (as I will be) and learn. [Lessig Blog] 6:55:31 AM    comment []

Music sharing doesn't kill CD sales, study says. Researchers at Harvard and the University of North Carolina say music swapping isn't to blame for falling music revenue, and might even help sell CDs. [CNET News.com] 6:54:17 AM    comment []

When Does Flexible Start to Mean Harmful? 'Hot' Yoga Draws Fire. As more and more people take up Bikram to lose pounds and gain strength, medical professionals are expressing concerns. By Lorraine Kreahling. [New York Times: Science] See also earlier coverage here at A blog doesn't need a clever name concerning the copyright dispute surrounding Bikram technique. Vincent Laforet/The New York Times A class led by Viraj Nelson Santini at the Bikram Yoga College of India's Manhattan studio. The school began in Los Angeles three decades ago. (No mention of the Choudry intellectual property dispute in the article. Odd.) 6:53:36 AM    comment []

Hearts, Minds and Padlocks. Shutting down a Baghdad newspaper, even one disseminating untruths, hardly makes the case for American-style freedoms to Iraqis. [New York Times: Opinion] 6:47:10 AM    comment []

Television's future potato famine. I see the future of television in two places: 1) BitTorrent; and 2) Konspire2b. Dig the list of things you do on the receive side of Konspire2b: subscribe to channels that match your interests go to bed wake up in the morning to the files that have arrived on your subscribed channels feel certain that the files are legit, thanks to konspire2b's heavy-duty, automatic, digital signatures unsubscribe from channels that disappoint you build trust for a channel owner's tastes over time (owners are completely responsible for what goes out on their channels) spend the time that you used to spend searching doing other less frustrating things (see 8 for a suggestion) start a channel to broadcast your own files This is the answer for the transmit side too. It's the future commercial Television will discover after it dawns on the people who pay for it (remember, it's advertisers, not viewers) that viewers will get better deals as active customers rather than as passive consumers, and will eventually contrive their own means of getting those deals. [The Doc Searls Weblog -- with thanks to Mark Turner for the pointers.] 6:44:30 AM    comment []

Two weeks from today, Neal Stephenson's The Confusion: Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle appears. You can pre-order it at Amazon, or just wait it out. Only 832 pages this time -- and showing this morning as #174 on amazon.com's list. (Volume three is due in September, and it's in the top 7500 already.) Okay. I'm eager. 6:38:07 AM    comment []

Seth notes: Walt Crawford has a special "Broadcast Flag" edition of his library 'zine (not blog) "Cites & Insights". [Infothought] 6:33:05 AM    comment []