Wednesday
I went to a meeting with Biella about the HealthHacker software and a meeting with Lee to answer questions for the SF IndyMedia folks about legal issues.
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I went to a meeting with Biella about the HealthHacker software and a meeting with Lee to answer questions for the SF IndyMedia folks about legal issues.
Speaking of retrospectives --
Thanks to Brewster Kahle, I can now read the long-lost full text of the original Californians for Academic Freedom web site. Maybe I should put it back on-line.
I remember that I used to see his machines in my logs (alexa.com), and I thought nothing of it at the time, but now the results of that are very interesting. (At the time, I don't think he had announced any plans to make the Internet Archive data available to the public on-line.)
I'm trying to read the copy of my web site on loyalty.org from January 2000. Amazingly, I found a copy of my web from I was in high school, in 1997 (in English, Latin, and Esperanto). There seems to be a gap in 1999 and 2000, but otherwise, they have versions of my home page from 1997 up to the present.
The Internet Archive is very controversial; one person I wrote to about the launch objected that the project "is not respectful of people's privacy and copyrights". (You can actually get your materials removed from public searchability easily, but to a large extent it's an opt-out system rather than an opt-in system -- you have to know that this archive exists, and you have to contact them if you don't want to be part of it, unless you have or had a robots exclusion file.)
I'm tempted to say that the Internet Archive is like the Google cache on steroids. (The Google cache itself is not uncontroversial -- also on account of privacy and copyrights.)
"Cipro Shortage: An Invented Scarcity" is an article by a libertarian skeptical of patents.
Drug makers are not permitted to respond to the street signs of the free market, to profits. The law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from competing for Cipro market share, supplying the demand, and, in the process of creating competition, dealing a blow to the Bayer monopoly price tag. Because of specific patents Bayer has obtained, other companies cannot bring supply and demand into equilibrium, thus satisfying buyers.Whether one thinks that granting to an inventor a near 20-year monopoly on the manufacture, use, or sale of a product is the right thing to do, is quite apart from acceding that a patent places a barrier on entry into the market.
A comment from Scott Craver on the DMCA, in a recent Supplemental Declaration in the Felten case:
We do not write and use programs such as tinywarp.c because we view breaking a technology as an end unto itself. To the contrary, breaking a technology is nothing more than a crucial step either in attempting to improve the technology or in attempting to prove that the technology cannot be made to do what it is supposed to do. Both, of course, are legitimate research objectives, and in either case, writing and using tools to circumvent access or copy control technologies is essential to our work. If we can no longer use the necessary instruments of science, then our field of scientific work will be paralyzed.(Supplemental Declaration of Scott Craver, para. 22)
I kept having the "I Thought We Knew That" techno song running around in my head -- "Whenever there's a technology, whenever there's a way", "I thought we knew that!", "Whenever there's a technology, whenever there's a way", "I thought we knew that!". ("The American public believes they are protecting themselves and Hollywood against a bunch of hippies and communists.")
Richard Hayes, in Ireland, produced a technical report which gives a complete algorithm for solving the 15 puzzle, and in fact for solving the general "n squared minus 1" puzzle. It's a recursive algorithm, which is a good idea which I hadn't thought of. So you can solve the "3" puzzle pretty easily, and then you learn to solve the "8" puzzle, and then the "15" puzzle, and the "24" puzzle -- and in each case you solve the puzzle by doing certain things which reduce each puzzle to the next smaller version.
Hayes provides a Java applet which can solve any puzzle up to and including the 195 puzzle, but you have to have a web browser which supports Java. There isn't any source code given; maybe I should try to run the applet through jad, for which there also isn't any source code given.
I don't know anybody in this country who's afraid of their law enforcement people at this time.
Contact: Seth David Schoen