Smith's attack on open-source drew an angry response from one of the original authors of the letter, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on technology and procurement policy.

"We had no knowledge about that letter that twisted this position into a debate over the open source GPL issues," said Melissa Wojciak, staff director of the subcommittee. Wojciak added that Davis supports government funding of open-source projects.

1. They use the Internet, by virtue of TCP/IP, as "proof" of their thesis.
2. They state that you cannot improve OR adopt OR commercialize GPL software.
3. They state that you cannot integrate GPL'd software with proprietery software.
4. They say you should keep publicly funded code away from the public sector, so that proprietary interests can make money from the work.
5. They equate a lack of understanding of the GPL with valid reasoning against it.

My compadre Ed Ward talks about The Insect Trust, a band that blew my head away forgettable years ago. Their first album was reissued on CD not long ago... [Link]

Although neither of their albums is 100% successful, when they do work, they work beautifully. I marginally prefer the second one, because "Eyes of a New York Woman" is so perfect and "Our Sister the Sun" has Elvin Jones thrashing away on it. But I also like the "singing bridge" version of "Special Rider" on the first album very much. As for what makes them still vital today, that's because so much happened at that particular period that a lot of the implications of some of that music has yet to be worked out. For instance, the Byrds. When R.E.M. started, people said they were "ripping off" the Byrds. Well, the Byrds never stopped long enough in that particular place, and, as we've seen, there was a lot to explore in that particular idea. Ditto country rock: during the 70's, a lot of that degenerated into L.A. singer-songwriter soft-rock wimpiness, and the rock end of it sort of got lost. Bands like Whiskeytown are still processing a lot of that information. Nobody has gone back to the sort of roots that the Insect Trust were involved with, let alone tried to attempt that particular fusion. I think there's a lot on those records worth exploring today, given young musicians with the sort of interest and background in these musics.

Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before. The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed. They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics. Not everyone will exhibit every behavior, but these are general trends in every community I've observed.

We hold that the primary cause of current telecom troubles is that Internet-based end-to-end data networking has subsumed (and will subsume) the value that was formerly embodied in other communications networks. This, in turn, is causing the immediate obsolescence of the vertically integrated, circuit-based telephony industry of 127 years vintage. CLEC, IXC and ILEC bonds used to purchase now-obsolete infrastructure assets have become (or inexorably are becoming) bad debt. Weak last-mile competition prevents the most powerful technological advances from reaching all but a few customers; this is the largest cause of long-haul over-capacity.

This Scientific American article describes the discovery of a new order of insect, Mantophasmatodea, nicknamed 'gladiators.' Biologists are busy: also ran across an article describing the discovery of a hundred new frog species in Sri Lanka. [Link]

But the fact that the evidence of this new order sat in museums, unnoticed for decades until a chance encounter (and an alert student) put the pieces together, makes us wonder. Are there more orders of insects we have yet to discover? To bug lovers like us, the natural world suddenly seems a bit wider and wilder than we had imagined it to be.

A word has power. In the world into which Chihiro has wandered, to say a word out of one's mouth has a grave importance. At Yuya, which is ruled by Yu-baaba, if Chihiro says one word like "No" or "I wanna go home," the witch would quickly throw Chihiro out. She would have no choice but to keep aimlessly wandering until she vanishes, or is changed into a chicken to keep laying eggs until she is eaten. In turn, if Chihiro says "I will work here," even the witch cannot ignore her. Today, words are considered very lightly, as something like bubbles. It is just a reflection of reality being empty. It is still true that a word has power. It's just that the world is filled with empty and powerless words.

Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary encryption program or statistical package to political activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this; take my word that it works right." That's a non-starter. If the software is open source, even though the human rights staff might not be able to personally verify that it's accurate and free of bias, they can take the source to a university or other expert and have it vetted. The same challenges arise when a human rights organization publicly presents its results. The politicians, generals, and other power-holders will dispute every step in reasoning. A lot of an organization's credibility lies in its process for collecting data and its use of statistics, but the software has to be certified to be trustworthy, as well. An open package whose source can be checked by any technically qualified person removes a potential area of dispute.

Johnson is one of those artists for whom there is no division between art and life. The work that ends up in the frame is a document of a process than an artifact. It is not the completion of the creative process but merely its medium, its means; art as a verb, not a thing. The challenge for an artist like Johnson is to live aesthetically. Cheap-rent New York of the 60s, with its remarkable concentration of spaces within which to explore such a possibility and people with the wit and sensibility to see it when it manifests, is one of the few places this was ever really possible. In the wake of the hyper-commodified art world of the present, How to Draw a Bunny looks like something from the Lives of the Saints -- an exemplary life from another time.

Close examination reveals flaws in Orwellian policebots

At the bail hearing for Johnston, Tinney and three other defendants in Houston, the FBI's Kristen Sheldon ... testified that an IP address is, "in very simple terms, a Social Security number. Only one person at one specific time can have that number." In fact, an IP address identifies a computer, rather than a person, and may not even consistently map to a particular machine in networks that use dynamic IP addressing. Midway through the hearing, the presiding U.S. magistrate asked, "What are GIF files?" (Emphasis added.)

This combination of cluelessness and irresponsibility is, unfortunately, not unusual. It also isn't challenged enough. As David Carr writes, who's going to stand up and complain when, if you do, some idiot will probably accuse you of being soft on child pornographers? But those idiots are, well, idiots. When the power to enforce the law is delegated to software employed by people who don't -- or can't be bothered to -- understand it, no one is safe. When you hear that people are using machines to enforce the law, remember the old computer-geek saying: "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

From Mindjack: Bryan Alexander's analysis of Lawrence Lessig's recent work and Lessig's book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. You know your world changed as digital technology proliferated, but were you aware how much it changed? Lessig's there, and he's focused on changes in the world of ideas, where something called "intellectual property" proves to be hard to pin down when it's no longer associated with a specific material form, when ideas and creations can be replicated at WELL and transmitted everywhere at once. The old-media response: try to control IP, keep it in the box. Lessig's message: when you do that, you constrain the public domain and the creative commons. [Link]

Both sides equally offend him: "policymakers on the Right and on the Left race to embrace a system of perfect control". Put another way, his resistance to overweening control regimes draws on a mixture of the new left's liberation/democracy discourse and old libertarianism. It's also a stance appealing to common sense and rationality, in attacking "[c]ontrol without reason". Disappointment at the market seeps through the struggle of arguments, as when Lessig admits that competition should generate ISPs to guarantee free access, but fails to do so because of a state-limited bandwidth. "This control is largely benign, at least where markets are competitive" (110). As Christensen argues in his Innovator's Dilemma, innovations can threaten the stability of business models, whose stakeholders react in a limiting way. However, a hint of a slant towards progressive politics, or at least discourse, emerges over the course of the book, from the (albeit ironic) call for "environmentalism in the Internet era" to repeated appeals for the good of society, to the accumulated attacks on corporations. Arguments against increased concentration of ownership of media properties appear fairly unparsed or hedged. A swipe at the entertainment industry for overdefending "a puny part of the American economy" simply misses the enormous scale of IP monies.

Folksinger Tim Rose was buried today. He had been living and working in Europe for years. Somebody mentioned him to me the other day, and I realized I had all but forgot his work. I was mostly into his first album, which included Morning Dew, which appeared soon after on the Grateful Dead's first album, and Hey, Joe, which was recorded by damn near everybody. Digging through his web site, I see that Rose was quite busy over the years, but I always think of his version of Joe, against which I always measured the versions that came later. [Link]

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