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Here's my obligatory pointer to Gordon Mohr's funny solution to the digital rights management issue:
I humbly suggest the most cost-effective and reliable solution to the copyright industries' troubles will be DRM helmets, bolted onto each dutiful consumer at the neck. When these helmets sense watermarked audio or video within earshot/eyeshot, they check their local license manager and instantly "fog up" if payment has not been delivered.In an unrelated story I just installed limewire on Sarah's machine and was showing her how to navigate the gnutella network. I love people's reaction when they first realize the extent of power granted by general purpose computers and peer to peer networks. "You mean I can put anything out there on my computer?"
This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.
I read yesterday that OS X 10.1.5 overwrites PHP so you have to install that again after updating the OS. This wasn't my experience.
Does it really make sense to put (RARE!) in an mp3 title if you are sharing it with the rest of the world on gnutella? No it doesn't.
You might think you're having a fun day, but I'm downloading a 44 megabyte file I'm not sure I want over a 2 KB/s connection. That's excitement. Much like the pitch drop experiment I found on metafilter.
I read the Times most mornings when I go for coffee. There's usually a copy lying around by the time I get there. But I don't read it so much for the news. I've always already heard all the big stories the day before on the web. But I'm still interested in how they report things.
Anyway, today there is a short story about the FBI's computer systems. I hadn't heard this one, but I simply cannot believe it. Who's in charge here? Apparently agents don't enter their reports in digital form! They just enter a summary of the reports and provide a few key words. So the way it is set up there is no way to search the body of all those reports. You can only search on the keywords!
Well that's the whole freakin' problem right there. What do they expect. Are they trying to do a shitty job? Everybody at the top should be fired immediately if this is true (I'm sure they'll get right on that now that my feelings are known.)
Let me repeat: FBI agents can not search on the full text of other FBI agents reports. Yet google can index the full text of the entire internet and provide advanced search capabilities to millions of users a day for free. Why isn't there a greater outrage about this? I think you could safely assume that 9/11 would not have happened if this problem had been fixed. Agents were aware (and suspicious) that lots of muslim men were taking flight courses well beforehand. But they couldn't put their information together. Can somebody up there please call google? You know, like before the next attack.
My digitalmediatree email accounts are flakey today. No doubt that was curcial information for your day.