Sick
I'm guessing I'm sick. I've been exhausted and a little dizzy for about a week, and there's a flu going around EFF (but my symptoms seem pretty different from anybody else's).
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I'm guessing I'm sick. I've been exhausted and a little dizzy for about a week, and there's a flu going around EFF (but my symptoms seem pretty different from anybody else's).
I got to go to the Berkeley DRM conference and Stanford spectrum conference (thanks to the organizers of each). They were very interesting, and I got my first glimpse of Marybeth Peters.
I also got to see Aaron Swartz and Bob Frankston, the latter preaching his very seductive gospel of connectivity.
Why, Bob asks, are CD sales down?
Because of Internet piracy! answers a hypothetical recording executive.
No, says Bob, because of cell phones. People used to buy CDs for entertainment while they were going somewhere, in a car or while walking around. Now they would rather talk to friends. If they have the ability to talk to friends, they find that more interesting than listening to somebody else.
Everyone nods.
Also at the spectrum conference, Judge Alex Kozinski served on a moot court panel and kept explaining that "property owners are very grabby".
I think I've understood the so-called "spectrum commons" argument (which may be misnamed), and I'm trying to write something up about it.
Even if you have a cell phone, which I don't, it's still worth buying a music CD now and then, at least if the CD is by Dar Williams.
Ben took me out to Borders in Union Square, where Dar Williams was performing and signing copies of her new CD The Beauty of the Rain. We each bought a copy and got it signed (and got to talk to Dar for about a minute).
Far and away the best song is "The One Who Knows", which is just lovely. (I would hold it up with "How Can I Help You To Say Goodbye?" by Patti Loveless, which has a sadder perspective on a related theme.) "The Beauty of the Rain" is pretty good too. In general, I don't think this CD is as consistently good as The Green World, which was a great triumph.
The Free Software Foundation has shipped its LNX-BBC-based membership cards! All of us at the LNX-BBC project are very proud.
If you join the FSF, you can get one. Even Jon Johansen is an LNX-BBC user!
In a profile of Ed Felten, Jack Valenti says:
What does breaking the code have to do with research? Research for what? Are you researching cloning, or the laws of physics? We're not dealing with Boyle's Law here . . . we're dealing with trying to protect a piece of property, a feature film, from being illegally stolen.
I gave the 15th anniversary address at SVLUG, which is odd, because Linux is only 12 years old. My talk was called "The Empire Strikes Back: Constraining Free Software Development" (a title partly due to Eben Moglen), and Biella, Praveen, and Riana came out to hear me along with about a hundred other people.
Several people in the audience were "TV people" and were quite familiar with the issues surrounding ATSC. It was funny afterward to hear one of them complain to the others about what a bad idea it had been to add color to NTSC.
I used MagicPoint for my talk. I was a little annoyed by MagicPoint's handling of line wrapping, but in general it seems like a convenient way to do a presentation with free software. It would probably be difficult for people to tell that it's not PowerPoint.
Who knows a convenient way to convert an ATSC transport stream to something more readily displayed by common PC software? Would you use HDTVtoMPEG2?
Contact: Seth David Schoen