The rest of the Beethoven symphonies will be broadcast and posted this week. Listen while you read the Grokster decision.

Symphony 6 will be broadcast on Monday 27th June, and available to download from Tuesday 28th June to Monday 4th July.

Symphony 7 will be broadcast on Tuesday 28th June, and available to download from Wednesday 29th June to Tuesday 5th July.

Symphony 8 will be broadcast on Wednesday 29th June, and available to download from Thursday 30th June to Wednesday 6th July.

Symphony 9 will be broadcast on Thursday 30th June, and available to download from Friday 1st July to Thursday 7th July.

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

This is an experiment in using wiki, a relatively new form of Internet interactivity, to bring readers into the process of forming and expressing editorial opinions. "Public Beta" is just a euphemism for "We're just trying this out. Please forgive any problems and give us suggestions for improvement."

I really don't think this is going to work. This is an idea whose time hasn't come.

Welcome to the Los Angeles Times Wikitorial Page (Public Beta)

Read your Neal, you geek!

It's not every day that Neal Stephenson writes an op-ed.

In the spring of 1977, "Star Wars" wasn't famous yet. The only people who had heard about it were what are now called geeks.

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

Acidus gives Elonka a run for the money. Way to go Acidus!

How scary. And how refreshing.

Make, a new quarterly put out by O'Reilly Media, is a throwback to an earlier time, before personal computers, to the prehistory of geekiness - the age of how-to manuals for clever boys, from the 1920's to the 50's.

The technology has changed, but not the creative impulse. Make's first issue, out in February, explained how to take aerial photographs with a kite, a disposable camera and a rig of Popsicle sticks, rubber bands and Silly Putty. It also showed how to build a video-camera stabilizer - a Steadicam, basically - with $14 worth of steel pipes, bolts and washers; how to boost a laptop computer's Wi-Fi signal with foil from an Indian take-out restaurant; and how to read credit card magnetic stripes with a device made with mail-order parts and a glue gun.

Congratulations to Acidus on being the first MemeStreams user to make the New York Times op-ed page. And on a Sunday, no less! (14:59, 14:58, 14:57, ...)

A New Magazine's Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty!

The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military.

"We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based US Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."

"What's changing is the realization that in this so-called war on terrorism, this might be the thing that wins the whole thing for you. This gets to the importance of the war of ideas."

I'm very happy to see an approach like this to the WoT.

Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Effort

"If everyone else is putting out horrible CD's," he said, "why not buy something from people with taste you more or less trust?"

Little-Known Bands Get Lift Through Word-of-Blog

This book was published in March by Brookings Press. Excerpts from the first chapter:

Movable type presses were available in China as early as the eleventh century, but they were little used and had essentially no influence. The European invention of the printing press transformed Europe because Europe was ready to be transformed.

We are now, potentially, at a similar turning point. Information technology may once again be poised to transform politics and identity. If the print revolution made possible the nation-state system and eventually national democracy, where might the digital revolution lead us? Can it help us create new, and possibly better, ways of running the world?.

This is an idea that I have a lot of interest in.

The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World

We show that network theory, combined with the analysis of roll-call votes using singular value decomposition, successfully uncovers political and organizational correlations between committees in the House.

A network analysis of committees in the US House of Representatives [PDF]

But, in fact, this world of binary outcomes is an illusion.

The Illusion of 'Either-Or' Politics

] Last year, another Brookings economist, Charles Ferguson,
] argued that perhaps as much as $1 trillion might be lost
] over the next decade due to present constraints on
] broadband development. These losses, moreover, are only
] the economic costs of the United States' indirection.
] They do not take into account the work that could have
] been done through telecommuting, the medical care or
] interactive long-distance education that might have been
] provided in remote areas, and unexploited entertainment
] possibilities.

This article oversimplifies this issue by focusing too much on the executive. There are cultural, infrastructural, and economic differences between the United States and places like Japan and South Korea which have a far greater impact on broadband development in those regions then federal policy. This is not "Bush's fault."

However, the Clinton administration clearly provided leadership in this area, and that leadership was clearly useful, and the Republicans are clearly less interested in telecommunications policy.

The question that I have is, where are the applications? What do my friends in South Korea do with their high speed internet access? They download movies off of p2p networks. This is not the kind of application that is likely to spur trillions of dollars in GDP. It IS possible to overbuild infrastructure.

They've got it. What are they doing with it? Broadband is not a core capability. It is a means to an end. Once you can clearly demonstrate the ends that Japanese can reach, that we cannot, you'll have a compelling arguement for serious government leadership. This arguement skips over this matter as if it was a forgone conclusion. It is not. Someone on this board knows what these applications are. Maybe I ought to be tracking down these brookings reports.

It is also wrong to say that US has always led this race. The US was about 10 years behind the French in development of basic network information services like email and behind nearly everyone in the development of good mobile phone service. The US has a slow tech adoption rate and is very cautious about moving forward. Getting the internet to happen in the US was like mice trying to get an elephant rolling down a hill.

In 1990 it was obvious to me, even as a kid, that I wanted a digital network connection in my house that plugged into my computer. It was obvious to me what I'd do with it. It is not obvious to me what I'd do with 40 megs a second in my house ('cept possibly cancel my colo contract). I promise its going to be obvious to me long before its obvious to the FCC.

Down to the Wire