By the way,
that
was my penguin, wherewith Wil Wheaton fought Barney's light
saber. That penguin has seen quite a lot. He was carried from
Massachusetts (where he was manufactured in Leominster and
sold in Northampton) all the way across the continental United
States on an Amtrak train in a suitcase with three other penguins,
and he was carried by Eric S. Raymond at Windows Refund Day, and
has probably had several other adventures besides. His cousin
long adorned the CoffeeNet.
It sounds like they make
quite a
lot of plastic stuff out there in Leominster.
David Weekly has
some pictures
from the fight, too.
Penguins
as weapons (get it?).
The stray cat who's been hanging around here and being very friendly
and cute finally took advantage of the opportunity (while I had the
front door open) to run up into our apartment and hang out here for a
while.
Via edu-sig:
Python code for AI
programming.
I actually mean to get my Python class going again,
and I ought to assign my students to write some game-tree search code.
Let's see if they can't calculate explicit solutions to a few simple
games, and maybe some decent strategy in others. (It seems that
Bram did that for
Connect Four at one point.)
That Lessig. He's always
appealing
stuff.
If you learn Esperanto,
you can correspond with everybody from an advokato to a
knabino:
http://www.china.org.cn/world/shi-window/index3.htm
Similarly:
http://www.china.org.cn/world/shi-window/korespondi_d/01.htm
Why are there so many people dez. kor. Esp. in Krasnoyarsk?
What's it like in Krasnoyarsk these days, and what kind of
Esperantist community is there?
I think there's something to be said for the pen-pal phenomenon,
although when I tried it in elementary school we seldom got beyond
one round-trip's worth of letters. Maybe that was my fault.
Bamford
on The Trial and detainees:
Today, if the court should ever turn down a request the
government can appeal to the F.I.S.A. appeals court, which has
the distinction of being the only court in the United States
that has never heard a case.
More on the Coleridge theme from yesterday: I found the
passage from C. S. Lewis
on-line (see "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really
foolish thing that people often say"). This turns up at the start
of Lewis's argument that Jesus was "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic".
(There are many ways out of Lewis's "trilemma" other than becoming
a Christian. Here's a somewhat superficial observation of mine: I
still think the trilemma relies for much of its emotional force on the
idea that nobody wants to be caught saying anything bad about Jesus.
In a sense, it reduces for some people into an emotional dilemma:
Believe in my revelation, or be caught saying something bad
about my revelation! In polite society, of course, nobody would say
anything bad about somebody else's revelation...)
I found this
comical
(but in a good way, like the Bamford quotation).
An interview Nick Moffitt and I did about a
year ago is
available in MP3
and Ogg formats.
The
DOC
DRM workshop transcript is now available (thanks, Politech); I
ought to read it. That was the workshop to which a bunch of activists
went, but I think I ought to read it for the useful information
therein.
One thing some activists haven't realized (although others have) is
that a lot of people who are trying to take away your rights are
doing it right in the open. (Sometimes "in the open" means "for a
registration fee of merely $100!", which is not exactly in the open.
But sometimes it's really in the open.) That means that you can go
and find out what they're doing and tell other people about it. For
example, people like Andy Setos from Fox will go to these events
and tell you exactly what they are working on.
As we found during one of the BPDG conference calls, after we
published information to allow interested parties to participate, and
then slashdot encouraged people to join the call, some people will
try to disrupt these meetings. In the case of the BPDG call, that
prevented us from hearing details of what the studios were trying to
do!
Now, the DOC workshop is a complicated issue because there was some
sense that it was important to tell the government that the general
public actually cares about copyright law and technology policy.
(Some people persist in saying that the people who went weren't the
general public. For example, Declan keeps calling them "geektivists",
which sounds somehow pejorative to me, even though I don't think
either "geek" or "activist" is pejorative.) And I think people do
have to find ways to keep doing that, because if you listen to "the
debate" as the so-called policy community is hearing it, there's
very little sense that any relevant harm is being done to the public.
On the other hand, in the conference call, there was no productive
purpose served, even if people wanted to utterly destroy and frustrate
the BPDG, because it's not as though the few companies which were
actually writing the proposal couldn't find some other (more secret)
forum in which to meet. They were already proving rather adept at
that. (Cory tells the story of being at at BPDG meeting where some
of the more powerful companies went into a closed session to
negotiate!) But, as I've said several times, the concrete result is
that we didn't hear, and interested members of the public didn't
hear, the substance of the negotiations. And that means that our
opportunity to tell people
about those negotiations is also frustrated.
I know that the freedom-loving technical community is rather social,
so what I think would be exciting is this: when people gather together
to talk about technologies of control or technologies of surveillance,
or to talk about policy issues, some skeptic should go and listen
and then just tell other people what happened. What we need is not
for somebody to prevent Andy Setos from telling some group that you
shouldn't be allowed to make an ADC which doesn't check for watermarks;
what we need is for people to start telling each other if
Andy Setos says that you shouldn't be allowed to make an ADC which
doesn't check for watermarks. If electrical engineers started to
talk to one another about that, within their own social networks, I
think that would be productive.
If everybody who works in technology (not just executives, not just
lawyers, not just lobbyists) heard that Hollywood
has
given up on
"no
mandate", I think that would be productive.
Via RRE:
a lot of people are in jail in the U.S. How many
people would you guess are in the U.S. correctional system?
66,000? 660,000? 6,600,000?
Salon printed Cory's short story
"0wnz0red",
which, among other things, is about trusted computing. (Cory
calls it "Honorable Computing".)
I've received an incredibly kind invitation; I sure hope I
can take it!
