Currently:
2003-05-03»
links o' the past few days»
- On
Warranties - Glenn Otis Brown clarifies the creative commons
license on indemnifying content users, as brought up by Dan
Bricklin. It's a tricky topic - do you encourage people to use
your works by taking on any burden of alternative copyright claims against
your work. Or do you share that burden, even as you share your work?
- Vi for
Squeak - it sounds perverse, but I've had a lot more fun with
Squeak
since I installed this. It's also one of the few changesets that
I've managed to file in without getting a fistful of confusing errors.
- Lisp
advocates - critique of Paul Graham and co. for being a bit
too superior about the failure of Lisp.
- 23 - well-regarded
movie about hackers, and in particular Karl Koch (Hagbard), the
Illuminatus-obsessed German hacker who sold
secrets to the KGB and ended up committing suicide. In German. Features cameo by Robert Anton Wilson!
- Fast
Forward Fifty Years - sadly curtailed autobiography of Bob
Forward, pragmatic hyper-futurist. Free download.
what is Beverley Hughes saying?»
Beverley
Hughes is the Minister of State for Citizenship and
person in charge of investigating introducing Identity Cards into the UK. She said a
very odd thing in Parliament last week:
Mr. Paul Marsden (Shrewsbury and Atcham): If he will make a statement
on plans to introduce identity cards. [109766]
The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Beverley Hughes): We
published a consultation paper on entitlement cards and identity fraud on 3
July 2002. We are at the moment making a detailed assessment of the 2,000
responses received to the consultation exercise, which ended on 31 July.
Many organisations and individuals have expressed support for a card
scheme, and that has been backed up by other research on the public's
views, which we will publish alongside our response.
What's peculiar about this is that I know for a fact that at least
5029 consultation responses were submitted via stand.org.uk. Of course, that consultation ended on the 31st
January, not July, but I assume that's just a slip of the mouth from Ms
Hughes. Unless she's planning to retrospectively change the dates, and dump
several thousand voter's responses (most of which were resoundingly negative)
out into the Home Office dustbins?
I'm going to mail her later today and find out what's going on.
2003-04-29»
ipod+»
Whenever Apple releases something, there's always a rush of people pointing
out other companies that have done the same thing, only better in some way.
Like it was written in Lisp, or uses righteous Ogg encoding,
or just isn't Apple. Usually you just let the waves of counterexamples crash
around you until they hit their correct target, which is the Apploids
thrashing in orgasm around your feet, but my... Neurosaudio has some seriously
out-there features. Song recognition, built-in FM transmitter, MP3 recording.
I'm not sure, but it might even be more expensive than Apple. Talking
about beating someone on their home turf.
2003-04-28»
back to work»
- Lumeta, net
mapping thing started by Bill Cheswick who is talking at
the Gates Science Building this
Wednesday about the future of Internet Security.
- "We don't
pay you to be as confused as he is" - Spinal Tap's (and The Simpsons and A
Might Wind's) Harry Shearer writes a ingenious
piece in the NYTimes suggesting that if the music industry doesn't
want kids with more time than money to pirate their music, maybe they
should stop exclusively marketing to them.
- Rand
report on the troubled spread of the Net to China, Russia, Latin
America, Middle East. Key assertions: China's crackdown is working
for now, Russia too weak to really kickstart IT, Latin America e-commerce
suffering from lack of credit/debit cards, popular distrust of delivery
procedures. Mexico most promising model. Elsewhere, establishment of
Internet centers with a "human face" could "facilitate Internet use in
small towns and villages". I have no idea what they mean by that, or
whether they just missed out on what a tourist revenue-spinner cybercafes
are, but some nice barcharts and stats.
- Domestic use
of SMS and IM, another talk, this time at PARC on Thursday.
Teenage use of IM and SMS is
another fork between Europe and the US, although I guess it's more to do
with the ratio of usage of the two forms. I should start
automatically exporting data from my calendar for talks like these.
They're often fascinating. The PARC talks have a video
archive but it seems to be lagging behind.
- Project
- Aura. Designing interfaces and hardware for an environment
where attention is the scarce resource. Bluesky wearable, pervasive,
task-driven computing research.
- The
science of pricing (via Dan Moniz).
This touches on what this week's column will be about. That is to say,
the column will be ripped wholesale from Dan and my conversation
about this topic.
2003-04-27»
drink? snacks?»
I've been online, thinking and talking all week, in one way or another, but
I don't seem to have kept a record of any of it. I don't have any notes,
didn't take any photographs, didn't update any wikis, and didn't even send out
much email (I did, however, spend too much time in IRC, which is never a good
sign of anything). What makes that worse is that much of my time was spent
discussing how to tech-transfer knowledge out of real world conferences like
Emerging Tech to a wider audience online.
To be honest, Emerging Tech suffers
from this the least: much of the
thinking that occurred here has already spilt out into the wider world
via various blogs. Lisa Rein videod a lot of the talks, and will be
uploading them to the Internet Archive . And compared to say,
Asilomar, which was on this week, and is one of those super-secret
invitational conferences where everything is off the record and they kill
anyone who even menti-urgh urgh thunk, ETCON is a veritable fountain of
openness. And I think benefits no end from that.
Anyway, we swapped out live blogging to make room for baby-tending and
party-organising. Fortunately, others were there.
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
