In this novel, Dick masterfully portrays the paradox of the American dream: that the selfish drive for personal gain ultimately leaves people feeling isolated and unfulfilled. What Hadley learns over the course of the novel is that the peculiarly American tradition of desperately searching for meaning or significance (otherwise known as a mid-life crisis) is often undertaken out of a selfish desire for fulfillment and is therefore doomed to fail.

...it is precisely this simple voice that Dick harnesses so brilliantly to capture a simple life in search of complication.

Something about that sentence hit a nerve deep within me.

Boing Boing: David Gill reviews Philip K. Dick's new old novel

The Viacom v Youtube lawsuit could be one of the key legal battles that will define the future of the Interet. Lessig wrote an editorial today in NYT critical of moves made at the Supreme Court that set the stage for this showdown, making the now popular accusation that they have legislated from the bench.

The Grokster case thus sent a clear message to lawyers everywhere: You get two bites at the copyright policy-making apple, one in Congress and one in the courts. But in Congress, you need hundreds of votes. In the courts, you need just five. Viacom has now accepted this invitation from the Supreme Court....

Congress, of course, is perfectly capable of changing or removing the safe harbor provision to meet Viacom’s liking. But Viacom recognizes there’s no political support for the change it wants. It thus turns to a policy maker that doesn’t need political support — the Supreme Court.

Some interesting discussion in the thread here. Of course, these basic legal questions may never see the light of day, as it is entirely possible that this case is merely a negotiating stick that Viacom is using to get more out of Google in some sort of backroom deal over content distribution.

This article over at Advertising Age provides some additional perspective.

"If the L.A. Times doesn't generate news from places like Iraq, how will Yahoo, which doesn't operate its own bureaus, maintain a reliable stream of professional-quality reporting? In a very real way, the internet risks killing off the goose that keeps laying its golden eggs..."

There is something ironic about writing a blog entry that quotes something quoted in a news article about the damage the blogosphere is doing to the business models of traditional reporting.

"Recommendation is the new marketing."

"Will Viacom acquire a social framework for video assets or is YouTube going to acquire a library of content? That's the question."

No one source of video content will ever be THE social framework for video assets. Social frameworks exist independently of particular sets of video assets. Attempting to establish that sort of control is self defeating.

However, if the social frameworks were king, you'd think MemeStreams would be the focus of attention and not YouTube. Ultimately, content is not king, and filters are not king. Bandwidth, and the money that funds it, is king. There will be as many social frameworks as there are societies. There will be many content producers, a small number of which will make money. But the market will only sustain a few free video hosting systems. Its not about production cost or end user value. Its about marginal cost. You can copy a floppy but you can't copy a server.

A lot of people learned the wrong lessons from the cold war. They beleive very strongly that the problem with socialism is that fairness destroys incentives. This is merely political rhetoric. The economies in western Europe are fair, and libertarians are fond of pointing out that freer economies are more efficient. But, western Europe is not on the verge of collapse. Focusing on this issue is to ignore the mountain for the molehill.

The problem with socialism is that it isn't a natural state. It has to be engineered into existance through authoritarianism. Intellectual Property has exactly the same problem, and the efficiencies afforded by its "free" market nature are minor when held next to the major structural weaknesses that exist in forced economic fantasies.

Our society is completely unprepared to face this reality because we're too steeped in the political rhetoric of yesterday's arguement.

Make Way for Copyright Chaos - New York Times

This page is all about the amateur effort at creating fusion. The process is easier than you might imagine!

The Fusor was the brainchild of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television. The device is best described as a spherical geometry, electrostatically focused, deuteron accelerator-collider.

It might appear that nuclear fusion is very difficult for the amateur physics experimenter to consider, but it is actually relatively easy to achieve. Costs can be controlled by working in stages and acquiring parts used or surplus. Skills are the key factor.

Fuck around with international nonpoliferation politics in your own back yard!

Start your own nuclear program!

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

This quote is relayed by Richard Saul Wurman in My Architect [2]. I enjoyed the film and would recommend it to those with an interest, but some architects seemed to want less personal journey and more architectural analysis.

Wurman also mentions this quote in the April 2001 issue of design matters:

Louis Kahn said to me shortly before he died that an idea that does not happen is no idea at all. Late in his life, Mies van der Rohe told a student interviewing him about his work that the secret to his success was to "do good work."

Other mentions of this quote: 1, 2, 3, 4.

More photos at Google.

I also liked this exchange, from the film:

Nathaniel Kahn: I think you've built way more ... you've had way more success ... rate, in terms of your buildings that you --

I.M. Pei: [sighs] Oh, building doesn't mean success. Building ... three or four masterpieces [is] more important than fifty or sixty buildings. ... Quality, not quantity.

No Idea At All

After some digging around, I located Mary's web site. It's a work in progress, but I found an early version of her spectrograph build.

Sweet, Hack-a-day has some details on the DIY Spectrograph!

Build your own laser spectrograph - Hack a Day

(This quote is not directly from the source I'm linking, you'll have to click through.)

At the Open Data 2007 conference in New York today, David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc. revealed that ISPs happily sell clickstream data -- and that it's a big business. They don't sell your name -- just your clicks -- but the clicks are tied to you as a specific user (User 1, User 2, etc.).

Holy Fuck! This is a major, major privacy issue. Apparently there are some MemeStreams readers who either use the Compete toolbar (which is not a problem unless you are fooled into installing it) or have their ISPs quietly spying on them and selling the data to Compete (which IS a BIG problem). I expect that there is going to be some fallout from this announcement.

Boing Boing: Are some ISPs selling clickstream data?

The 'rsstroom reader' is a bathroom gadget that prints news feeds onto your your toilet paper. By means of wireless connectivity, it features Wi-Fi Connectivity, USB 2.0, and RSS 2.0/Atom compatibility.

Now you can read MemeStreams on the toilet AND you can show us what you think of our content at the same time!

Finally Something Useful To Do With Dubya Bush Speeches

The governor of Utah signed a nonbinding resolution on Tuesday that calls on the US Congress to do something about the rising tide of Internet pornography, preferably using technology to stick it in a ghetto where those who don't want to see it don't have to do so. The resolution, which passed both houses of the Utah legislature, was backed by CP80 ("Clean port 80"), a group founded and headed by Ralph Yarro. CP80's plan to cleanse the Internet isn't the only controversy that Yarro's involved in, though; he also happens to chair the board of directors for SCO.

OK, its official. SCO doesn't just hate linux. They hate the entire Internet.

"The Internet is not a force of nature, it's a man-made creation. It can be changed and evolved to better serve us all," said Yarro in a statement after the signing of the resolution. "There is no reason why we should tolerate an Internet that allows children to easily access pornography."

Someone has been reading Lessig... And getting exactly the wrong point. What, exactly, is the problem with filtering software?

CP80's solution would apply to the US only, of course, and their plan for dealing with international pornographers (who are unlikely to move to another port dictated by the US) is a simple but draconian one: consumers would ask ISPs to "simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country." Problem solved!

Instead of clamoring for legislation that forces anyone who says the word fuck to move to a different TCP port why don't they just ask pornographers to include an HTML meta tag on their pages. Not authoritarian enough? Doesn't generate revenue for our financial backers by creating a government mandated market for their software systems? Its just not any fun if its Constitutional? Sure, you won't get 100% compliance, but you're not going to get that anyway.

This page really erks me.

The Internet Community Port Act (ICPA) protects your right to publish, view AND block content deemed inappropriate to minors - a choice that you do not have on the Internet today.

You can install Internet filtering software.

ICPA supports the use of widely accepted social and legal standards, such as MPAA, RIAA, ESRP, FCC, the legal definitions for obscenity, indecency and harmful to minors, or any other community-defined standards.

In other words, anyone who says the word fuck would have to move to a different TCP port. Its very important that children don't hear the word fuck, because it harms them developmentally, as opposed to the word shucks, which is just a word. Did I mention that Unicorns are real?

Categorization Is Not Censorship

If categorization were censorship then phone books, libraries, street signs and all oth... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

SCO Chariman wants Congress to make port 80 porn-free

A 17-year-old girl won a scholarship worth $100,000 for building an inexpensive yet accurate spectrograph that identifies the "fingerprints" of different molecules.

They can cost as much as $100,000, but Masterman's invention -- made of lenses, a laser, aluminum tubing and a camera -- cost less than $1,000, Intel said.

Amazing. I want details on how to make one.

Teen wins $100,000 science scholarship - CNN.com

This strip is good. Read it.

FLEM Comics - More fun than a sack of dead kittens.