Out of Cheese

I'm off to Philadelphia for

I'm off to Philadelphia for the weekend, so blogging (and email, and any other communication) will be sporadic.

Scott Rosenberg gets the story

Scott Rosenberg gets the story wrong regarding Apple's use of the DMCA to prevent the fine folks at Other World Computing from providing some software for third-party DVD drives on the Mac. The issue as I understand it is that OWC was patching Apple's iDVD application, which would fall under the copyright protection portions of the DMCA.

Whether Apple was right to do this is another matter entirely, but the portion of the law that allows them to do so has nothing explicit to do with copying movies, and it is definitely allowing Apple to protect its intellectual property. The DMCA could not be used to prevent OWC from producing its own movie-making software that worked with third-party DVD drives, for example, but it can allow Apple to prevent OWC from modifying Apple's software.

Larry Lessig notes that the

Larry Lessig notes that the Constitution explicitly states that copyright protection should be time-limited. The debate is therefore not a question of whether to protect (apologies to Richard Stallman), but rather how long is appropriate. That's what Eldred v. Ashcroft is all about -- has Congress overstepped the meaning of the Constitution's "for limited Times" intent through its unceasing extension of copyright protection?

Lessig's piece mentions a Rutgers Computer Technology and Law Review article from 1996, "Economically Efficient Treatment of Computer Software: Reverse Engineering, Protection, and Disclosure". I'd love to read that. I'm just not sure how I'd go about getting a copy.

I'm an uncle (again)! My

I'm an uncle (again)! My first nephew was born last night in a suburb of Paris. Mom, Dad, Sheina, and baby are all doing well as far as I know.

Lilly understands much more than

Lilly understands much more than she gives herself credit for.

Oh, and her birthday was Tuesday. Happy 22nd, Lils!

CNN reports that New York

CNN reports that New York and San Francisco are the finalists for the U.S. bid for the 2012 Olympics. I'd love to see San Francisco win the U.S. bid and have it go on to host the Olympics. Opening ceremonies at Memorial Stadium at Stanford would be incredible. In the 1996 Olympics, Stanford-affiliated athletes won more individual gold medals, 12, than all but six countries in the world. It'd be great to see them put forth a similar performance on their home turf.

Bill Bumgarner notes that California's

Bill Bumgarner notes that California's ban on smoking in bars and restaurants hasn't hurt bars' revenues and has improved the health of bartenders statewide. I'm glad to hear that -- the smoking ban is one of the reasons why I liked living in California. Since that ban, it's been a little odd (and disturbing) whenever I walk into a restaurant and am asked, "Smoking or non?" Of course non, and hopefully no smoking anywhere around me either, thanks.

Weblog referer links are very

Weblog referer links are very entertaining at times. Tonight, for example, I learned through my referer logs that searching for People Who Have Made a Difference in 2002 via AOL lists my blog as the sixth result. That's impressively silly.

Along similar lines, I'm frustrated that Radio's referer logs (which you can access here for my page) get reset at midnight every day. I've been contemplating writing a program to check the logs before midnight, store them, and produce pretty totals, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store and

Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room is extremely amusing.

I was in California over

I was in California over the weekend to play in the YABA Treasure Hunt. More on that later. I stayed with a friend who lives on University Ave. in Palo Alto, and Friday night we happened to drive by the Apple store around 10 p.m. It was just as James Duncan Davidson describes it -- massive numbers of people crowding around the store and onto University Ave. It would've been a lot of fun to stop by and join the party.

Alex Golub writes what Larry

Alex Golub writes what Larry Lessig's OSCON speech should have been. He's right. Better yet, Lessig agrees.

Oh, and Lessig's blog has an RSS feed now. Yay!

David Pogue's review of Jaguar

David Pogue's review of Jaguar in the New York Times mentions a nifty feature that I didn't know about -- the Calculator application can now do currency conversions. I wish it'd do binary, octal, and hexadecimal math, too, but currency conversions are certainly a nice plus.

Lawrence Lessig has a blog.

Lawrence Lessig has a blog. The first post? A response to Dave Winer's whining over the past week about Lessig's comments at the O'Reilly OSCON that the tech community has done nothing to stop the absurdity in Congress.

Says Lessig: "Here's the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas." Of course, this is exactly what Dave Winer proposed a month ago, and what I wrote a game plan for a day later.

But game plans only get us so far. Nobody has stepped forward to implement the plan -- not Winer, who would perhaps be in the best position for it, not Bruce Perens...not anyone. Now it's too late for this year. There's simply no way to create a campaign in time for November. Yet people like Amy Wohl still want to know where to send a check.

Someone needs to get the ball rolling for 2004, then. Set up an organization and start raising money today, with the plan being to disburse it between now and the November 2004 elections. Additionally, spend much of the next year trying to talk to specific members of Congress, teaching them how technology works and what their constituents want technology to do. A year from now, we'd have a few names of members of Congress who don't want to listen. That's when the campaign starts in earnest.

Only 15 months after the

Only 15 months after the last time it was synchronized, my Palm IIIx is backed up again. Finally.

I happened to wander into

I happened to wander into Borders last night on the first day Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets was available. I finished reading it a number of hours later, perhaps better described as early this morning than last night. It's not as good as some of the previous Ender novels -- certainly not as good as Ender's Game, which is one of my favorite books -- but it's still a good read. And as always, Card writes about serious issues in ways that makes me think about aspects of many of them that I otherwise wouldn't consider.

An article in the L.A.

An article in the L.A. Times notes that Oldsmobile will disappear in two years. I'm sure this is old news, but I hadn't noticed it before. It's a shame -- I've driven an Olds Alero the past few times I've been in California and really liked it. I actually prefer driving an Alero to my 2000 Accord.

In any case, my next car will hopefully be something like this one. I can't wait to see what hybrids are like when I'm ready to get a new car a few years from now.

Declan McCullagh is at it

Declan McCullagh is at it again, arguing that the DMCA shouldn't really be much of a concern. He dismisses Ed Felten's case, for example, by noting that Felten probably would have won -- ignoring that Felten decided not to publish in the first place not because of a fear of losing but because of the costs of a lawsuit to him and his research team.

The pull quote from the story takes the cake: "If published research does not include working code, the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero." This is supposed to point out that the DMCA doesn't really restrict research. Of course, one of the requirements for respectable research is that the published results be reproducible -- that another researcher can take the paper, follow the steps, and produce the same output. Now, as the DeCSS haiku proves, code in its standard form isn't strictly necessary to describe an algorithm...but any such description is going to be sufficiently indistinguishable from code for a reasonable court to consider it in the same way. In other words, either code or an extensive algorithmic description is a necessary component for much of security research and has to be included in the published results for the research to be worthwhile. The inability to do that is only one of the chilling effects of the DMCA.

Lilly has a good quote

Lilly has a good quote from Albert Einstein on her page. What she was doing looking up Einstein quotes at quarter of five in the morning is beyond me, but it's a good quote regardless.

Today's New York Times Magazine

Today's New York Times Magazine has a really interesting article on the differences between prescriptivist and descriptivist linguistics, the effect of computers on linguistic analysis, and an effort to build a corpus of actual usage of American English. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in linguistic research, or even just if you never realized that Joan Osborne's "What if God was one of us" is a misuse of the unreal conditional tense.

Josh Allen takes a broadside

Josh Allen takes a broadside against Larry Lessig: "Lessig is like Stallman; a collectivist opposed to individual property rights."

I don't think Allen understands Lessig's views at all. My understanding of Larry Lessig's writings and speeches is that he believes firmly in property rights...but that certain fundamental principles of our intellectual property system have been badly broken or ignored in recent years. Lessig doesn't have a problem with patents; he just has a problem with the failure of the patent system to avoid granting bad patents, particularly in software. He doesn't have a problem with copyrights; he just objects to the moves of Disney and others to extend the expiration of copyrights indefinitely.

Richard Stallman, on the other hand, doesn't believe in patents, copyrights, or other intellectual property protections in anything close to their current form. Other than a general belief that the current system needs to change, I doubt there's much on which he and Lessig agree.

Lessig's views are much closer to those of Tim O'Reilly, who wrote a terrific column last week explaining why the proposal to mandate that the government use open source software is not only absurd, but also contrary to many of the beliefs underlying the open source movement itself. I'm sure Lessig would agree.

mpt seems a bit down

mpt seems a bit down about his role in Mozilla UI design -- he's effectively the only real UI advocate in the entire project -- after seeing comments from Netscape's Peter Trudelle at CHI 2002.

Trudelle's comments are largely on target. Netscape didn't really know how to run an open-source project with a commercial implementation when it decided to release its source code. That was apparent to me when I interviewed with them for an internship a few years ago, and was one of the reasons why I spent that summer at Apple instead. They've come a long way, though, and these days they seem to have a better idea of how to manage the project and what their goals are. But they're still a bit short on UI design, and they'd do well to get mpt some help. Their best solution would probably be to have a regular Netscape employee join mpt to have someone in UI design who can make decisions that affect the commercial product, and probably a third person so they can have a real UI committee. I wish them luck, and I hope mpt sticks with it. They need him.

How Appealling links to a

How Appealling links to a New York Times story that shows an interesting side of the justice system. There's a murder case in Ohio in which the judge just refused to permit the prosecution to seek death penalty because he believed the county would face an unreasonable burden by paying for the public defense for a capital case. That's not the way the justice system is supposed to work. You'd think there would be a way for counties with larger budgets to subsidize the rare expensive cases in counties that can't afford them, beyond the current 50% state contribution mentioned in the article.

Thanks to Lawrence Lee's response

Thanks to Lawrence Lee's response on Radio's discussion boards, I've finally moved Radio. I don't know how any normal user is supposed to figure this out on his own.

I just wasted an hour

I just wasted an hour in a failed quest to move Radio to another partition. Yay. For a product that's used by so many people, I can't believe how buggy it is. More importantly, I can't believe that it was last updated three months ago. While the folks at UserLand are working on features like blogging via IM that very few of their customers will use, those of us running Radio on Mac OS X still have to deal with the fact that we have a non-Mac-like application that hogs about 20% of the CPU on an 867MHz G4. It's pathetic. I have to quit Radio to be able to play Warcraft 3 without choppy video.

In news that's gone surprisingly

In news that's gone surprisingly unnoticed at news.com and Slashdot, Infoworld reported today that Bruce Perens is leaving HP to concentrate on political work.

This is big news. I'm excited to see a high-profile person from the high-tech community deciding to spend his time concentrating on tech policy. That's what I've been asking for for a while now, and I'm glad to see Perens step up and try his hand at that role.

At the same time, I'm a bit concerned about the some of the policies that Perens is likely to advocate. This week, for example, he took part in a march in San Francisco in support of a bill that's trying to mandate that all software used by the California state government be open source. That's a completely absurd proposal. I sincerely hope that he concentrates on policies that are reasonable and which at least have some chance of success. To do that, he'll have to adopt a degree of moderation that I'm not yet convinced he has.

Sha Sha is on a

Sha Sha is on a blogging rampage! She used to update her page about once in a blue moon, but now she's gone and posted five items in the past week. Wow.

She's also changed her page to be very green in the middle of all of this. The big question: Is there a connection between the color change and the increased blogging frequency? I wonder....

While wandering around at Borders

While wandering around at Borders last week, I found Myth-ion Improbable on the shelves and bought it immediately. It's been quite a few years since Robert Aspirin's last Myth book, and the drought has gone on long enough that the series might be more interesting due to its author's writing troubles than for its plot.

That aside, I was very excited to see a new Myth book. Turns out it's just an OK read, but that's about what I expected. Aspirin really boxed himself into a corner plot-wise with the previous book in the series, so this one unsurprisingly takes place mid-series. It doesn't really have the same style or sense of humor as the previous ones, though. Hopefully he'll be able to return to the quality of the earlier books with the next one in the series, which is apparently due in hardcover next month.

After a year of intermittently

After a year of intermittently trying to find a company selling Keyspan's USB PDA Adapter, I finally found a single one remaining at Small Dog Electronics yesterday and ordered it right away. I haven't HotSync'd my Palm IIIx with a computer since I moved to Washington a year ago because I no longer use any computer that has a serial port. When the adapter shows up I'll finally be able to back up everything I've typed into the Palm in the past year. Yay!

Declan McCullagh has a column

Declan McCullagh has a column on news.com in which he argues that since geeks aren't good at politics, they should work on technological workarounds for legal obstacles rather than trying to change the law.

That's just silly. Sure, most programmers aren't much at politics and end up wasting their time on worthless things like online petitions, but that's no different from what any other people do. As in any field, those who have a sense of how to accomplish things in politics should work at the political angle, and those who don't are better served working on other things or on learning how the business of politics works. It's much easier in the long run to legislate around technology than to innovate around legislation. The DMCA, for example, outlaws a whole host of technologies that haven't even been invented yet. What would the person who started Anonymizer.com do if Congress required all ISPs to track user-identifying information?

No, geeks need to be at events like the one in Silicon Valley today where they can talk directly to the people who write the laws and get them to understand what they're doing. Nothing produces worse legislation than a one-sided argument. By providing the counterpoint, geeks in politics can ensure that Washington does the right thing...or at least that it does the wrong thing less often.

Neil Gaiman's summer reading list

Neil Gaiman's summer reading list looks really good. I'm half-tempted to simply buy everything on the list without even thinking about it.

Back from a weekend in

Back from a weekend in California. 'Twas beautiful down there, as usual.

Nicholas is reading Terry Pratchett.

Nicholas is reading Terry Pratchett. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Disc, Nicholas!

Stanford's Residential Computing organization has

Stanford's Residential Computing organization has been searching for a Mac OS X-savvy replacement for Stairways' Assimilator for a while now. It looks like MacAdministrator 3.0 might do the job. It'd be great to have Stanford's computer clusters switch to Mac OS X, and replacing Assimilator is a required first step toward making that switch.

I mentioned a little while

I mentioned a little while ago that U.S. Airways didn't credit me for any miles for my flight on September 11th of last year. Well, I went back to their Dividend Miles site tonight and was pleasantly surprised. They didn't just credit me for the flight from Philadelphia to Champaign; they gave me credit for the entire Philadelphia-to-Seattle flight that would have happened if not for the terrorist attacks. That's rather nice of them.

Think $129 is a bit

Think $129 is a bit too expensive for Mac OS X 10.2? Think again. CompUSA is selling Jaguar for a mere $82,402.02.

Five days without updates. It's

Five days without updates. It's been a long week.