Since peer to peer is functioning so well in the sphere of producing software, the pre-eminent form of social capital, and since our whole economy is becoming dominated by immaterial processes, what could be expected is that practices arising out of this new cooperative sphere would infect the total economy. This thesis is the most radically expressed by Stephan Merten of Oekonux, who calls for a GPL Society, where the principles behind the General Public License would gradually be extended to the whole society.

Malcolm said the Internet has become "the world's largest copy machine" and that criminal prosecutions of copyright offenders are now necessary to preserve the viability of America's content industries. "There does have to be some kind of a public message that stealing is stealing is stealing," said Malcolm, who oversees the arm of the Justice Department that prosecutes copyright and computer crime cases.

Why did my ISP shut me down? According to the ISP, SpamCop's policy is to put all of the ISP's accounts on the block list if the ISP does not shut down the accused party's site.

Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist "justice" system: conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based not on anything the accused did but on favorable comments about him by the "wrong" people; the evidence is withheld from the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is clearly innocent).

Note also that the "evidence" against me consisted only of a single unsigned e-mail message which would have been trivial for anyone to forge. Thus SpamCop provides an easy denial of service attack against a web site.

The more I read Lessig, the more I know I need to read him. [Link]

Look at the history of innovation in the context of the Internet. The World Wide Web was built not by AOL or Prodigy, but by a researcher in Switzerland. Hotmail was developed by an Indian immigrant. ICQ, which was the beginning of the really persistent instant messaging system, was developed by an Israeli—or rather stolen by an Israeli from his son—and deployed outside the United States and sold to AOL for $400 million.

All of these innovations were enabled by people outside the dominant, powerful industries at the time. They didn't need the permission of those industries to develop and deploy their innovations. That was what Andreessen was talking about. He said there was this window of time when you could become a desktop software maker because of the birth of the Internet. Before the Internet, everybody thought that the industry was dead because they thought software was in the control of Microsoft and other large companies. But the Internet radically transformed that. There was a period of time when an extraordinary explosion of innovation occurred. And once the explosion occurred and people came in to try and change the architecture of the environment, Andreessen says the opportunity for innovation disappeared.

... Lexington psychologist Arnis Berger sees significant differences from the Colonial era. E-mail messages lack a number of things personal encounters had in the past, Berger said: eye-to-eye contact, visual reactions, confrontation, or the chance for a retort.

''When people don't have a dialogue, it doesn't take into account people's responses,'' Berger said. ''There is no room for modifying or considering someone else's point of view. It's easier to be rash and irresponsible and sometimes rude.''

"At face value, it's like Brahms doing variations on a theme by Handel, which I think is a very cool idea," he says of his process. "This is part of our whole classical tradition. Bach did that, and Handel did that, and Brahms did that, and Berg did it.

"But it's more than that." Instead of grabbing a musical theme, he says, "it might be that I'm capturing the pitch contour. Another time, I'm capturing the rhythm and separating it out. I might take the production value of a beautifully produced rock record and somehow fold it over onto Moroccan trance music, and then fuse that onto the rhythm of a bebop piece by Thelonious Monk."

At the zenith of American enthusiasm for space flight—the period between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960s—Bonestell’s illustrations and spacecraft designs appeared not only in print but in games, motion pictures, television, jigsaw puzzles, and toys, bringing his vision to millions of people. Over the next few decades he created more than half a dozen other books. His masterwork was undoubtedly the 40-foot mural of the lunar surface commissioned in 1956 by the Museum of Science in Boston. The painting is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum, which plans to restore it for display in the museum’s new annex near Dulles International Airport. But Bonestell’s favorite space picture was not one he created himself—not with his own brush anyway. It was the televised image “showing a man first stepping out there, putting his foot on the Moon. I want to tell you, I wept; tears came down my face. I was so excited and emotional about it… . It was the realization of something I had been hoping for for a large part of my life.”

Joy said the SCSL, which he helped develop to cover Java and several other Sun software technologies, "fixed the flaws in the open-source licensing" by providing a better foundation for profiting off the software. The SCSL permits others to see and modify source code, but gives Sun the authority to accept or reject those changes. Sun also has the authority to charge royalties to companies shipping products using the software.

The SCSL proved unpopular with many in the open-source community who preferred the freedoms provided by the GPL. "I got hazed out of the open-source community because of this," Joy said.

The MIT team constructed wood beams that contained wiring to carry Internet protocol messages between devices connected to it—like light switches. To avoid competing standards in the future, the team used basic RS-485 wiring, which has a bit rate of only 100 Kbps, rather than more expensive proprietary wiring. Thanks to the researchers' clever design, this slow bit rate supplies plenty of speed for tasks such as turning on lights remotely. Gershenfeld's group and other researchers figured out that the important parts of the code for connectivity amount to just a few kilobytes. And IP-enabling a device by programming those few kilobytes costs about $1 a node—a great price.

“I can understand them wanting to ban weapons or things that look like weapons, but surely common sense has to take over at some point.

“I was really angry at first because of the absurdity of the situation, but then I saw the funny side and realised it was simple lunacy.

“The whole world is going mad if we resort to such stupid measures.”

Binx Bolling, in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer

Lateral thinking and a creative approach are ideal ways to unlock the potential of redundant technology. In this way we can investigate playfully and be creative with what the machines can do, rather than being frustrated by what they can't.

Today, except for immigrant workers eager to stay invisible, few ride the rails just to get from place to place. With all the risk and potential for mishaps, comic and tragic both, walking is almost more efficient. But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach.

It is a matter of balance. Any architect--or urban designer--who wants to engage nature has to be willing to give it something more than a token position. It is much like the relationship of architecture to art that is selected to decorate it versus its relationship to art that is commissioned to be a part of it. Architects have struggled with this for years. We all know how trivializing the Henry Moore placed in front of an office building is both to the building and to the sculpture, and how potentially rich the possibilities are when architects truly collaborate with artists to create works for the architecture. Why are there not more collaborations with landscape architects? Landscape, after all, is also the crafting of space and the making of form. But most of the time landscape architects arrive on the scene after all architectural decisions have been made, relegated to the tasks of either embellishing what is already there or working with pieces of land that are separate and distinct from the building and considered outside the realm of the architecture.

It's impossible to understand Ashcroft's view of the world without understanding his view of God, whom he says he "invites" into all his daily activities. And it's impossible to overestimate how deeply Pentecostal biblical training permeates his view of right and wrong -- and stiffens his spine against criticism.

History is written by the winners, and they may or may not get it right, Ashcroft is fond of saying. "I don't particularly care if I do what's right in the sight of men. The important thing is for me to do right in God's sight. . . . The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts."

"I think it's long overdue that these kinds of questions are being raised. But I think that for many American reporters who know about this, it's not worth it to risk losing access to their senior Pentagon sources, so they don't report it," said Pike, a defence commentator for several major U.S. TV networks and for CTV's Canada AM.

We look at markup languages in the context of complex, urgent problems facing humanity. The talk intends to develop a context in which the evolution of markup languages is seen as crucial to the evolution of tools capable of supporting and augmenting what Douglas Engelbart calls the Capabilities Infrastructure of Networked Improvement Communities. If time permits, a demonstration of an engineering prototype of a system aimed in that direction will take place.

The way to solve the problem of not exposing your business logic to competitors is to separate your app into an open-source engine and a bunch of declarative business-rule schemas that you keep secret. Databases work this way, and websites (the web pages and CGIs are the schema). Many vertical apps can be partitioned this way too -- in fact, for things like tax-preparation software they almost have to be, because the complexity overhead of hacking executable code every time the rules change is too high.

Marx, Groucho Marx, once said that religion is the opiate of the people. I say that when religion outlives its usefulness, then opium...will be the opiate...Ahh that's not a bad idea... All right...However, I want to thank Mr. Guinzburg, Tom Guinzburg of the Viking Press, who has made it possible for you people to be here this evening to enjoy the Friction Citation - the Fiction Citation. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW - a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half billion people in the world today. 218 of them ... million live in the United States which is a very, very small amount compared to those that are dying elsewhere...Well, I say that you will be on the road to new horizons, for we who live in a society where sex is a commodity and a politician can become a TV personality, it's not easy to conform if you have any morality...I, I, I said that myself many years ago...But I do want to thank the bureau...I mean the committee, the organization for the $10,000 they've given out...tonight they made over $400,000 and I think that I have another appointment. I would like to stay here, but for the sake of brevity I, I must leave.

Brief E-Democracy Definition

E-democracy represents the use of information and communication technologies and strategies by democratic actors (governments, elected officials, the media, political organizations, citizen/voters) within political and governance processes of local communities, nations and on the international stage. To many, e-democracy suggests greater and more active citizen participation enabled by the Internet, mobile communications, and other technologies in today’s representative democracy as well as through more participatory or direct forms of citizen involvement in addressing public challenges. – Steven Clift

• Chills free expression and scientific research,
• Jeopardizes Fair Use, and
• Impedes competition and innovation.

Section 1201 is being used by a number of copyright owners to stifle free speech and legitimate scientific research. The lawsuit against 2600 magazine, threats against Princeton Professor Edward Felten’s team of researchers, and prosecution of the Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have imposed a chill on a variety of legitimate activities.

For example, online service providers and bulletin board operators have begun to censor discussions of copy-protection systems, programmers have removed computer security programs from their websites, and students, scientists and security experts have stopped publishing details of their research on existing security protocols. Foreign scientists are also increasingly uneasy about traveling to the United States out of fear of possible DMCA liability, and certain technical conferences have begun to relocate overseas.

These developments will ultimately result in weakened security for all computer users (including, ironically, for copyright owners counting on technical measures to protect their works), as security researchers shy away from research that might run afoul of section 1201.

10.Jul.02 - About 200 people took part in the 3rd anti/border camp in Poland in Wizajny. Among the participants were groups and persons from Lituania, Balarus, Russia, Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, Austria, France, Finland, USA and Poland. At the camp there was a lot of networking and proposals for future actions; there was discussions on sexism and racism, of further noborder/actions; international noborder-action day on October 13, mobilisation to Strasbourg, anti-WEF actions and coordination of anti-NATO actions in Praha. Also there was quite good integration with local residents. The noborder camp in Wizajny was the first of a series of anti-border actions happening all over Europe during this summer.

"I think it was the association with Tommy Hall that made me realize it was a whole 'nother thing going on, that truly new ground was being broken," Kinney says. "Everything that we did was suddenly geared in the direction of mind expansion." Hall, a Houston native, introduced Texas blues/garage rock to LSD, Eastern philosophy and the academic psychology he picked up at UT. Predating the Grateful Dead by a few weeks, the Elevators were the first band to openly refer to themselves as "psychedelic."

Their debut LP, "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators," was released in 1966, while they were in San Francisco, influencing the Grateful Dead and the nascent Bay Area scene. At a time when long hair and open drug references were genuinely dangerous, the Elevators album was utterly unique.