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Great interview with Eban Moglan, the Free Software Foundation legal counsel, and Columbia University law professor. Kind of long, and a little technical, but you really should find the time to read this. He is very clear about many very difficult to think about issues.
"What we have here are two different structures of the distribution of cultural product. You have a set of people whose fundamental belief is that cultural products are best distributed when they are owned, and they are attempting to construct a leak proof pipe from production studio to eardrum or eyeball of the consumer. Their goal is to construct a piping system that allows them to distribute completely dephysicalized cultural entities which have zero marginal cost and which in a competitive economy would therefore be priced at zero, but they wish to distribute them at non-zero prices. In the ideal world, they would distribute them at the same prices they get for physical objects which cost a lot of money to make, move and sell, and they would become ferociously profitable. They are prepared to give on price, but at every turn, as with the VCR at the beginning of the last epoch, their principle is any ability of this content to escape their control will bring about the end of civilization."From what I can see, Moglan is the main legal mind behind a huge change in society of which the Napster story and the Decss case (making DVD's play on Linux machines despite industy efforts to stop this) are just the tips of the iceburg. Some people think he goes too far (for instance, in another place he makes the very curious argument that all digital content, by virtue of being digital, exists as long strings of zeros and ones, or in other words, all pieces of digital content - things like programs, music, movies, ebooks - are really very long numbers, and it shouldn't be possible to copyright a number) but I think it would be more true to say that most people aren't aware of how fast, and how radically, the world is changing. Of course I could be wrong. I don't think Richard Stallman is a crackpot either, so what do I know? Anyway, read this article, I think Eban Moglan knows.
The "trusted client" is upon us. Wes is right on it as usual. First he points to the classic Richard Stallman piece The Right to Read. The key passage in this dystopian short story is: "Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger." And then Wes points to this fine print on the Adobe eBook (a new format for publishing books in electronic form) website:
" If you are a software programmer, you should note that the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader's security implementation does not allow program debuggers to be executed on the machine while the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader is running."Not quite threatening prison terms yet, but the idea that Stallman's fears are looking a little more reasonable is very scary indeed.
Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress as it is commonly known, is the first plant to have its entire genetic sequence read by scientists.
Massive list of links concerning the intersection of Art, Technology, Science & Culture.
Been thinking about Montana a lot lately. My father's side of the family is from the big sky country. My great grandfather was a homesteader in Paradise Valley. Despite the promising name, there is a good reason why they were giving away that land: you couldn't grow enough food to make it through the winter. But thanks to a little side work on the newfangled railroad, my ancestors survived, although the land was lost - in good cowboy fashion - on a hand of poker. Tough life, or so the legend goes. I "lived" there briefly during my college years, but only through the good will of some real westerners. It's beautiful country, but it's cold. The people have to be tough. I, on the other hand, am clearly from the east ("the concrete jungle" as my grandfather would say) where you just have to be loud, and maybe a little pushy. That's a survival skill too, I guess, but it's different. Anyway, it seems like a few lucky (where 'lucky' means 'crazy') modern people are going to experience the real thing: frontier.
More planets discovered in the "habitable region."
We saw the new Ang Lee movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" last night. I heard somewhere (NYTimes?) that you want to break into applause at the end of the first fight scene, and that's exactly what happened in our theatre. Really impressive. They managed to capture exactly what "flying" feels like in my dreams. Not so much Superman-style all out flying, but an almost weightless running, bounding, hopping, floating. Good stuff. Highly recommended.
Space.com has this article about NASA's contact with the 35 year old Pioneer 6 spacecraft.
"NASA successfully contacted Pioneer 6 on Friday, nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency’s oldest working spacecraft was launched into solar orbit on what was to have been a six-month mission. NASA used its 231-foot (70-meter) dish antenna in Goldstone, Calif., to lock onto a signal from the spacecraft’s 8-watt transmitter at 7 p.m. EST. 'We have made contact with the spacecraft and have a downlink from it,' said Washington Downs, the Deep Space Network operations chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), halfway through the 2.5-hour tracking period. At the time, the spacecraft was 83 million miles (133 million kilometers) from Earth."(via /.)
More on Tim Berners-Lee's semantic web vision.
Brenda Laural, Brad Wieners, and Douglas Rushkoff on "What ever happened to the cyber revolution, part II."