] According to ScienceBlog, the U.S. Office of Naval
] Research, trying to keep friendly armies in Iraq from
] accidentally blowing each other to smithereens, is
] helping create software that connects instant messaging
] (IM) with machine translation (MT). The result: Chat
] software to be used in Iraq that automatically translates
] your messages into the correct language of the reader,
] called the the Coalition Chat Line - it's 'getting rave
] reviews from U.S. and allied-coalition personnel.'"

Very interesting... The actual article is slashdotted out, so I'm linking them instead for the time being...

Slashdot | Navy Unveils Polyglot Chat For Iraq

]
] It was pointed out to me the other day that the
] ICANN/NTIA/Verisign root zone file contains a previously
] undiscussed top level domain.

Whack...

Where Did the .Root Top-Level Domain Come From?

An archive of (Mostly) English Television Station Test Cards.

The Test Card Gallery

It concludes with a series of observations and recommendations for policy action and further research.

The most interesting recommendation here is that copyrights should last about as long as patents.

Evolution Scenarios for Future Networking Technologies and Networks

There aren't too many normal people waking up in normal suburban split-levels assuming they should rule the world. But God bless the upper class. They've lost their legitimacy, but they haven't lost their self-confidence.

Clash of Titans

If you are not listening to Denali, you are not cool. March 16 for those of you in Nashville. Seriously.

^ DENALI ^

ryan is the supernicety wrote:
] Ryan-- The key, as we were discussing last night, is the
] "sweat of the brow" doctrine which was overruled by the US
] Supremes in the most famous database/copyright decision, Feist
] Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340. In
] that case, Plaintiff published a telephone book. Defendant
] copied it. Plaintiff knew he did because they had placed
] false listings in it.
]
] I don't widely advocate using copyright law to accomplish
] this, but I think that databases probably should be protected
] in some form or another.

I think there is some substance to the sweat of the brow argument, but the devil is in the details.

This proposal has no expiration date. No copyright has expired during my lifetime, and so I see copyright as eternal by matter of fact, but of course there are laws which claim that some copyrights will expire at some time eventually. No matter how unrealistic those laws might be, in this case there would be no such laws at all. In many ways this fits the rules with the reality, but I think this is wrong in both circumstances.

The scope of this law is incredibly unclear. It obviously could apply to search engines which take facts out of your website and reindex them on it's website. It might apply to Google News. It might apply to MemeStreams. It could prevent people from republishing stock quotes and sports scores unless they obtained them first hand. Any kind of software (such as the "Sherlock" program in MacOS) which finds information published on the internet and recontextualizes it might be illegal unless these rights were specifically given up by the publishers (and who does that?). Bioinformatics software which uses the bioperl modules to make applied use of data in the Blast database of genomes would be illegal if the results were republished on a website. If you wanted royalty free access to a genome you'd have to sequence it yourself. Pricewatch/Froogle systems would almost certainly be a thing of the past.

Furthermore, given the course that intellectual property law has taken in recent years I think it is naive to assume that the scope of this will be limited. Even if it is limited at first, it will expand over time.

Clearly this will have the effect of removing information from the public domain or making it more difficult and/or more expensive for the public to access. Industries which take raw data and recombine it at a second or third level would impacted. This is being done because it is believed that it will increase the incentives that information compilers have to compile that information in the first place.

Basically, we're saying that we want more tier one databases and less tier two and tier three applied re-use of that data going on in our society. Is this a desirable social outcome? Are there databases that we would like to see that aren't available right now because no one will compile them due to the fact that others will simply steal the contents? I can't think of a single example.

No, this, much like copyright extension, is a social policy which literally makes our society dumber, that thereby weaker and poorer, for the direct short term financial benefit of a very small number of people. Its a crime.

Now, how about crafting a law which provides a reasonable, clear distinction between "stealing" sweat of the brow data and republishing it in another tier one database, versus using sweat of the brow data to create recontextualized, value add tier two INFORMATION, and which requires royalties of the first activity (selling photocopies of the phonebook) but not the second (Google News), and you might find me supporting it.

But of course, thats not going to happen, because thats not really what these people are interested in.

RE: Wired News: Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine

] I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead
] through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl
] "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite?
] because one can ride there for hours and not meet any
] single car and not to see any single soul. People left
] and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places,
] woods, lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those
] which left from 80th in fairly good condition

Ryan -- this is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. It is a photoblog of a daughter of a nuclear engineer who tours around Chernobyl on her motorcycle.

Photoblogging Chernobyl

Hijexx wrote:
] BBC:
]
] "A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US
] was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the
] Taleban even before last week's attacks.
]
] Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by
] senior American officials in mid-July that military action
] against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of
] October."
]
] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm
]

OK, *THAT* is interesting. I'm popping this back out to my MemeStream. I'm not terribly suprised that they were planning to attack Afghanistan. Obviously it should have been done sooner. However, it does put the situation in a slightly different light.

However, there IS a response from the US in the Guardian story:

Mr Simons denied having said anything about detailed operations. "I've known Niaz Naik and considered him a friend for years. He's an honourable diplomat. I didn't say anything like that and didn't hear anyone else say anything like that. We were clear that feeling in Washington was strong, and that military action was one of the options down the road. But details, I don't know where they came from."

It IS understood, as presented in the Guardian story, that the US was trying to get BL out of Afghanistan, and the use of force was on the table, but the idea that they had a specific October timetable is rather amazing.

RE: Furor over Bush's 9/11 ad

] When they plotted the links and topics shared by various
] sites, they discovered that topics would often appear on
] a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared
] on more popular sites.
]
] "What we're finding is that the important people on the
] Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit
] links (back to their sites), but the people who cause
] epidemics in blog networks," said researcher Eytan Adar.
]
] These infectious people can be hard to find because they
] do not always receive attribution for being the first to
] point to an interesting idea or news item.

HP tracking the spread of memes through the blogosphere