Google is broken. This is kind of fun...

Slashdot | What's Wacky with Google?

] I believe the Unix workstation users who are buying Macs
] are small in number and not enough to boost Apple sales
] on their own. But they're key players -- the same type of
] people who snuck PCs into the corporate environment under
] the cover of darkness while their overseers remained
] wedded to mainframes and other bigger computers. These
] are the folks who'll soon be making a lot of the buying
] decisions in IT departments. So they are the future, and
] they promise a bright one for Apple.

I was pondering this a year ago, but the stock is overvalued (much more so now then it has been in the past) and there are some things that Apple has gotten wrong (like printing).

BW Online | October 1, 2003 | Finally, an Opening for Apple in IT

A packet storing a piece of data, just like an orange with a message written on it, once pushed travels for a period of time before coming back to the source - and for this period of time, we can safely forget its message without losing data.

This is an old idea, but a fun one...

Juggling with packets

] I've seen a number of things like this over the years.
] While sometimes laws like that are designed to keep US
] companies from boycotting Israel or South Africa or Burma
] or black people, and sometimes even enforced, that's usually
] not the real purpose (unlike laws _requiring_ US companies to
] boycott Cuba or Iraq or France), just as the Foreign Corrupt
] Practices Act laws that forbid US companies from bribing
] foreign officials usually aren't intended to hunt down corrupt
] US companies.

Anti-boycott compliance has been mentioned on MemeStreams before, but not discussed. I want to know what you think about this. I find the idea uncomfortable, but I also find the specifics thorny.

Is boycotting someone an act of speech or of association, which should have first amendment protection? (Do I have a right to do business with other people of my choosing?)

Should it be legal for the government to prevent you from engaging in a boycott? (I.E. compel you to agree to trade with someone?)

Should it be legal for the government to compel you to engage in a boycott (i.e. economic sanctions against Cuba or North Korea)? If so, they why can't the government prevent a boycott as well?

Should it be legal for the government to prevent a company from refusing to do business with black people? If so, how is this different from anti-boycott enforcement?

Should it be legal for the government to prevent a company from doing business with North Korean people?

Re: Boycotting the Unwilling

Now professional journalists have to survive not only competition among themselves, but also from that with ordinary netizens. The only way to compete now is through the quality of their articles. That means that the age of competing through the name card "I am a New York Times reporter" has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen -- whether he is a professor or a neighbor -- writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner.

Good interview with the creator of OhmyNews

Japan Media Review -- OhmyNews Makes Every Citizen a Reporter

] After Sept. 11, when all the newspapers were recording
] who, what, when, where -- there was a big question of
] why. Why did this happen? What's going to happen in the
] future? A lot of people were spending a lot of time
] looking for news, and I was one of them. All the servers
] were slow and it took a long time to find the content.
] Fundamentally, I wanted to build a tool that would
] automate this: Here's a new development, let's find all
] the articles that talk about this development.

OJR article: Interview with Google News Creator

bucy wrote:
] As Decius has said, now the court proceedings start. Best
] case scenario is that ICANN can get a preliminary injunction
] against Verisign forcing them to turn SiteFinder off. If so,
] it will be very difficult for them to turn it back on.

Well, I was wrong, they backed down. Which means I seriously overestimated them. I presumed that ICANN wasn't going to tell them to back down because there was nothing in the contract that this impacted. I was wrong. Verisign's lawyers must have know this. And their engineers must have anticipated the technical nightmare. If there were no technical problems with this they would have asked for permission. So it must have been clear that things would play out this way. Why do it? Right now they've wasted a lot of money, pissed off a huge number of customers, and, in general, look like assholes. Where is the upside for them? Maybe they ignored their engineers and their lawyers, except for the ones who where telling them that Iraq bought nuclear weapons in Afri.... wait, sorry, wrong issue...

] Does anyone else think its insane that a domain registrar
] should control the master databases? Its a HUGE conflict of
] interest! Why doesn't ICANN (or some other non-profit/NGO)
] run it??

I think its just historical. Its like the Bell System. Netsol ran it, and they let netsol become a business, and then they figured out that there needed to be a competitive environment...

RE: ICANN | Announcement | 3 October 2003

] Any digital content can easily be transformed into a sound
] file, or in technical copyright lingo, a "sound
] recording," which when fixed becomes a "phonorecord."
] Many compulsory license schemes only apply to "music" but
] since they don't define the term, or discuss changes in
] how audio works are categorized, one must assume that
] they are using the current definitions of "sound
] recording" and "phonorecord." Consequently, any creator
] of digital content can benefit from a music-only
] compulsory license scheme.

LawMeme - Compulsory Licensing - What is Music?

] I suspect that "Mommy I want to be Atari's Asteroids Game
] for Halloween" was only slightly less creepy for parents
] to hear than, "Mommy, I just chopped up Fido with a
] shovel and had sex with his face!"  Kids who couldn't
] afford this one had to settle for being Intellivision's
] "Astroblast" game, instead.

Ahhh, Halloween in the 70's, when space age materials science had finally trickled down to the common man in the form of the ubiquitous full color printed trash bag plus plastic mask costume. Each one celebrated, while simultaneously advertising, a pop culture icon. How innocent we were. Looking back it must have been fucking creepy to see the all of the neighborhood kids turn into little stereotypical billboards for an evening. It must have been the moment people started to realize that maybe consumer culture had gone too far.... And here we have the hall of shame:

retroCRUSH: The worst halloween custumes of the 1970s!

] Seriously, though, I'm interested in figuring out how we
] can build a Net that is a lot less prone to viruses and
] spam, and not just by putting in filters and setting up
] caches to test things before they get into your computer.
] That doesn't really solve anything. We need an
] evolutionary step of some sort, or we need to look at the
] problem in a different way.
]
] I'm not convinced there's not something modest we can do
] that would make a big difference. You have to find a way
] to structure your systems in a safer way. Writing
] everything in Java [a programming language created by
] Sun] will help, because stuff written in antique
] programming languages like C [a widely used language
] created by Bell Labs in the early 1970s] is full of
] holes. Those languages weren't designed for writing
] distributed programs to be used over a network. Yet
] that's what Microsoft still uses. But even Java doesn't
] prevent people from making stupid mistakes.

Juicy intervew with Bill Joy