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| Thursday, August 29, 2002 |
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Changing my spots 
| | I'm installing Jaguar. Curious to see how it goes. |
| | [2 hours later...] Hmm.. no way to import Palm base into Address book... choice between two closed chat systems (Apple's and AOL's)... I'll find the virtues eventually, I'm sure. Right now I gotta play with the kid. |
Coblog amongt yourselves
| | No time to remark on more of it (I'm in a meeting), but there are several interesting threads weaving in the Discussion zone (that link to the left). |
Webontology
| | Be careful what nest you club with your position paper. |
Self-composting at MSNBC
Stat
Vote Colleen Sterne
| | Time for me to do the same. |
| | She's an ace. If you're reading around here, vote for her. |
Law less
| | Sheila Lennon weighs in with some well-considered thoughts on copyright. She says its origins were ... not to promote artists, but to promote the creation of a publicly available culture. |
| | She also agrees with Verizon cousel Sarah Deutch, who says: |
| | We also want to see a law that's balanced and that the user community will also accept. The copyright community has to understand the reality that if consumers are not happy with the compromise... many of these illegal activities are going to continue. |
| | All fine, as long as we're talking about writing and music. |
| | But software is something else. We can talk about it in the same terms (we write, publish and copy it), but what it does for us is radically different. It's stuff we build. It serves as a platform for other stuff we build. It's an environment for whole domains of our lives (such as our professions). It's provides tools for every kind of activity that can possibly be aided by computer. Those all involve different conceptual frameworks to scaffold our understanding of what software is, and what it's good for. |
| | So why bring copyright law into the conversation at all? Only one reason: it's like publishing. It seeks to lock software into one conceptual framework. |
| | That's not a good enough reason. That reason gives insufficient respect to the profoundly unique nature of software — to the ways software is unlike anything else, and must be understood on its own terms. And we haven't even begun to agree about what those terms are. |
| | I'm a professional open source advocate. I think open source is a Good Thing, as long as it's a plain and simple choice people can make, on both the supply and the demand sides of marketplaces. |
| | I look at it that way because I'm also a libertarian. I have great faith in the unintended consequences of laws, especially those applied to subjects that are still new, changing rapidly and insufficiently understood by everybody involved. The Net is one of those subjects, and so is software. |
| | Much as I like and respect Larry Lessig, I don't believe copyright law should apply to software at all. Dave makes sense to me when he says to Dr. Weinberger, If I build a house I can live in it as long as I want. If I want to rent out rooms I can do that too, as long as I want. |
| | Dave makes software. He also gives software away, along with all kinds of ideas he could easily protect with patents or copyrights, but chooses not to. I respect his choices about both. |
| | In that last quote he conceptualizes software as real estate, not "intellectual property," though he might think of it that way as well. I don't know. But his message is clear: He owns his software. If you don't like it, don't buy it, or don't rent it. |
| | The people to whom it does matter are the free software advocates, which, in some ways, include Larry Lessig. |
| | I believe both Dave and Larry (and the commercial and free software communities behind them) have fundamentally different understandings about software. In their separate conceptual frameworks, both are valid. |
| | And until we find ways to reconcile those frameworks, I'd rather not see any new laws based on either of them. Or on open source, for that matter. The independent software development community is too small already. More laws aren't going to help. |
| | [Later...] I just got off the phone with Dave, who said something really interesting: The source that really matters isn't the code; it's the brains that create the code. I'll leave it up to the rest of ya'll to follow the implications. |
| | I still love and use MORE. Not as much as I used to, but often enough. For taking and organizing notes on the fly, it's invaluable. Even for writing long-form stuff. A fair amount of the prose I post here is drafted in MORE. Same goes for my stuff in Linux Journal. If somebody could just add a way to embed links and make it save as simple HTML, it would be killer. (Radio Userland's outliner does that, but I still like MORE better as a pure writing tool.) A 596k program last improved in 1992, it was not only the most useful writing and organizing instrument ever created, but the first presentation program as well. Even today I like many of its features much better than PowerPoint's. |
| | What Dave says about the brains behind MORE is critical here. It speaks as well to what Judith said yesterday about the frequent pointlessness of secrecy. Because the ideas introduced by MORE were never implemented as well in the programs that knocked them off. I'm talking specifically here about the ouliners in Word and PowerPoint. Word's is better than PowerPoint's, but both are lame compared to MORE. Microsoft has had ten years to improve on those ideas, and approximately nothing has happened. The genius behind those ideas was ignored, then forgotten. Even in Word and PowerPoint, they're legacy features. It's a sad thing. |
Warschwag
| | By the way, Ben is also the source of the real cool one-line hack that produced the translucent terminal window above. |
New hope for AOL
| | So when AOL gives up on their pre-determined, already proven wrong - 'can't work' business model of 'owning the cable access customers', and cuts a REAL commerce deal with REAL partners who TOGETHER are gonna supply INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMING to real HUMANS - I say RIGHT ON. This is a turning point -- a day to celebrate! |
| | But only for the faithful. I'm glad Marc is one of them. |
On the other wing...
| | They've certainly got the cynical case down cold. Here's Richard: |
| | Knauss' larger point is that tech people don't understand politics, aren't active in it, and are seemingly incapable of doing the things you have to do in order to be effective in politics. He's right, of course. I personally spent five years lobbying my state legislature on a regular basis, so I know something about how the game is played: you show up in person at the Capitol, get meetings with lawmakers, press your case, and then work it in the media. |
| | You show up at hearings and testify on bills, and then you plead with every member for their vote. When the other side has the votes, you seek amendments that will blunt the effect of their victory. And you put your own bills together to protect your position and to repeal any gains made by the other side. Playing the game like this for years, you begin getting invited to testify at special hearings, and you're invited to serve on panels, boards, and commissions. More important, your name gets around the Capitol, so that media folks interview you when they're spilling major ink, deep-pockets donors seek your advice about where to spend their money, and you get connected to people with real access who operate behind the scenes. In time, you win some victories, many of them unnoticed by the media but important in the aggregate. |
| | Almost invariably, the tech people who wanted to get involved in my cause thought they could accomplish the task by writing e-mail to lawmakers and to each other, mainly the latter. So they spent their time creating web sites, model laws and mailing lists instead of doing real work. Promoting a Libertarian Party member for Congress does exactly what Knauss says it does -- drains off resources of time and money that could be spent doing something real. It's a sad way to go. |
| | He's right about all but that very last point. |
| | Howard Coble was running unopposed until Tara showed up. Sure she'll lose, but in the process a lot more geeks will get involved in politics. At the very least they'll fund and support what we hope will be exactly the kind of hard work Richard talks about. |
| | Weblogs are sowing the seeds of countless grass roots movements. At least a few are bound to grow. Just watch. |
Wannaskinnybes
| | Twelve pounds down, so far. |
Deer Story II
| | Howard's dad ditched his car Tuesday to avoid a deer. He's okay, and so is the deer. |
| | My own deer story had a less happy ending, at least for the deer. |
| | It happened many years ago, when I was living in Hackensack, New Jersey, and commuting about sixty miles up route 23 to my job as a morning news guy at WSUS, in Franklin, which was way out in the exurbs. My vehicle was a big-ass snot-green '69 Chevy Biscayne with black vinyl seats and bald tires. It looked like an unmarked cop car. I made the run, which took about an hour, between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning. |
| | At dawn, right around 5:15am, I was starting down a long slope toward the Route 515/Stockholm exit (right about in the center of this map here) in the fast lane when a deer appeared at the side of the road and made a long leap right into my path. I hit my brakes, but it was too late. I caught it square as it took off on a second leap toward the grassy median. I saw its startled face and big brown body held for a moment by the forward movement of the car; and then the world began to spin as the car went out of control, sideways across the median, then backwards across the two oncoming lanes on the other side of the highway. |
| | The car came to a rest on the shoulder of the far side of the highway, pointing in the correct, eastbound, direction. |
| | I got out and went to look for the deer. When I finally found it in the tall grass of the median, it was barely alive. It was a buck. There was a little blood at the base of one of the nubs on his head that would have become antlers if he had lived. The poor guy just stared up at me and heaved one last breath. |
| | I walked back to the car. Traffic was absent and I was in a rush to get to work, so I turned around drove the wrong way on the highway back toward the 515 intersection, where I could take a right and go report the incident to the Stockholm highway patrol station. |
| | Meanwhile a highway patrol car came up on the westbound side, travelling parallel to my car. The officer took an interest in my car going the same direction in the eastbound lanes, and turned his pursuit lights on. I stopped at the intersection with 515, however, and turned in front of him, leading him the short distance home to his own station. |
| | "What's going on?" he said. |
| | "I hit a deer back up above where you first spotted me. I just came here to report it." |
| | "Pretty big. A buck. No rack, though." |
| | "Yep. Lying in the median back there." |
| | "It's yours unless you give it away." |
| | I got to work on time. The bumper and hood of the Chevy were a bit rumpled, but the car was okay. |
| | Later, when I told my father about it, he was pissed. He was a hunter, and he loved venison. "I'd have come up there and gotten it myself," he said. |
| | It was a slow news day, so I took the advice Scoop Nisker would give years later: If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own. |
| | So I opened with my own lead. |
| | When I was done for the morning, I went out and bought some new tires. |
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