All Area Codes Now National?

People who move to places served by different area codes are increasingly keeping their old mobile numbers, with their old area codes -- whether they're moving across the region or completely across the country. With national calling plans and flat rate long distance plans, why not?

Area codes may thus grow into an indicator of where you're from, moreso than where you are.

My migrations, in area codes:

212 201 713 415/510 408 512 415

«» (0) comments

Winner's Curse Not Just For Auctions

Russian dies after winning vodka-drinking contest

«» (0) comments

Audible Magic's Maginot Line Against P2P

At the O'Reilly Network, I write: Audible Magic's Maginot Line Against P2P

«» (0) comments

Robots Attack White House, Film at 11

Some have suggested that something fishy is going on with the White House webserver, and the "robots.txt" file it uses to discourage automated web crawlers from visiting portions of the site. The Democratic National Committee sees devious historical revisionism, naturally.

Further wild speculation is available at Dan Gillmor's eJournal, especially in the comments.

But I'm pretty sure that this just a clumsy mistake, or misguided reaction to some haywire crawler, rather than any intentional manipulation.

In fact, I work for the Internet Archive on web crawling technology, and just 5 days ago I was relayed word, via email, that the White House webmaster wanted us to extensively crawl their site. In fact, they even wanted us to ignore most of their robots.txt "Disallows" directives -- because aside from the first 4 directives, "all the prohibitions were on links to plain text versions of the formatted pages."

Now, it's awkward for crawler operators to manually override the directives we typically respect, on a site-by-site basis. Rather than expressing such wishes in private communications, we would prefer that whitehouse.gov begin its robots.txt file with a narrow expression of their legitimate exclusions...

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /help


...and then continue their robots.txt file with additional alternative directives for other crawlers, or all crawlers ("*"). Then we clearly know that except for the 4 listed URL-prefixes, our site crawling is encouraged.

But awkwardness does not imply scheming, and there was no hint of sinister intent in their expressed wishes. Instead, we were told "we could scoop everything up, no problem" -- a genuine desire to have whitehouse.gov material archived, on a topic-neutral basis. We suggested that the White House webserver make the clarifying robots.txt changes described above, but I haven't yet seen a confirmation that our suggestion reached the right people.

So rather than squinting to see something sinister here, I'd suggest giving the whitehouse.gov team the benefit of the doubt. From what I've seen, they want their site crawled, archived, and searchable -- and their robots.txt should eventually stabilize to confirm that fact.

«» (0) comments

The Unevenly Distributed Future

VentureBlog: Ubiquity Breeds Utility

Naval Ravikant visits the Dartmouth campus for the Unleashed Conference, and thanks to the ubiquitous wireless computing there, sees the clear outlines of our near future. Of his observations, my favorites:

• Instant Messenger for voice will emerge [and will eventually be packaged in a hearing-aid sized device]
• Voice is just an app ["The phone companies will suffer mightily."]
• Un-terminated [many -- perhaps most -- wireless access points can do without a landline uplink]
• Bandwidth matters! [people find uses to fill all the local wireless bandwidth -- including file sharing -- despite slower landline uplinks to the outside internet]

«» (0) comments

The (MSN) Map Is Not The Territory

Time for a head-to-head competition between the online mapping services. San Francisco's "Central Skyway", an offramp from US101/I-80 to Fell Street, was demolished months ago.

Have the online maps caught up?

MSN Maps (formerly MapBlast) still shows the long-gone skyway (image capture as of right now):

MapQuest does no better:

Yahoo Maps is the winner, with an accurate map:

What's a little odd is that all of these maps claim the same company, Navigation Technologies/NavTech, as their map source. Apparently only Yahoo is aggressively updating their licensed data. Go Yahoo!

«» (0) comments

Me Too

New Scientist: I want to live forever, an interview with University of California San Francisco professor of biochemistry and biophysics Cynthia Kenyon.

I need to cut back on my carbs and drink more red wine.

«» (0) comments

Coming sooner than you think: the 850GB hard drive

Maxtor is already shipping a 300GB hard drive based on 5 internal 80GB platters. Meanwhile, Maxtor also reports that recent improvements in "perpendicular" recording technology can more than double platter capacity to 175GB. The new techniques are said to be fabricable in current equipment.

That suggests single standard-sized desktop drives, using 5 internal platters, with capacities around 850GB in the not-too-distant future.

«» (0) comments

Sony Ericsson T610

I just got a Sony Ericsson T610 GSM mobile cell phone with color camera. It's almost as small as my old Nokia 8810(?) chrome "matrix-phone" -- and it does a bazillion more things, including take decent pictures. Here's the first photo I took, from inside the T-Mobile store, while waiting for the contract paperwork:

«» (0) comments

My copyright, my soul

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats intends to auction off futures contracts on his brain pattern, which he copyrighted last year. The referenced Wired article considers the offer mainly as a commentary on copyright law.

I, however, wonder if Keats has read Greg Egan's Permutation City or similar science fiction. Keats' neural patterns, if ever completely measured and recorded, might be enough to "resuscitate" him as a conscious simulation at some point in the future. There, he'd be at the mercy of those with the rights to his "pattern." Would he be a mental slave laborer? A plaything?

So, a short story concept: Keats' present-day lark of a performance piece condemns him to potentially infinite confinement in a dark future, after not-so-nice people buy up his reproduction rights. Meanwhile, his peers who "retained their self copyrights" enjoy immortality in a near-paradise, enabled by the same technologies that imprison Keats. Imagery evocative of traditional fables about "selling one's soul to the devil" would be used throughout.

«» (0) comments

So much WiFi

There are now so many open WiFi nodes in San Francisco that on most streets, you can just close your eyes, hold your finger up in the air, and check your email on your eyelids.

Well, not exactly. But someday!

«» (0) comments

Silver lining of Hepatitis A: asthma prevention?

I strongly suspect there are many as-yet-undiscovered -- or simply misunderstood -- viruses which confer significant survival benefits: saluviruses. (See my previous discussion here, here, and here.)

Now, the BBC reports research indicating that once someone has recovered from a bout with the disease-causing Hepatitis A virus, they may be spared future asthma.

In this case, it's unlikely that the virus has inserted a lingering genetic capability. Rather, the immune system is left, in the infection's aftermath, better calibrated to ignore transient environmental irritants. For example, previous research has suggested that each of the following suppress asthma...

• Intestinal worm infections
• Exposure to dirt and benign bacteria
• Minor viral infections

Meanwhile, antibiotic use in infants may promote asthma -- perhaps by forestalling the immune system's own self-calibration against minor infections.

«» (0) comments

"California" in Schwarzeneggerian

There has been some confusion about the proper way to say California as Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger says it. The key is to start with "Hollywood." Replace the "-wood" with "-fornia" and you get "Hollyfornia" -- a state of mind. Then just add a "K" sound at the front, and... voila! You get...

Khollyfornia

Now you too can sound just like Arnold!

(Arnold says "Khollyfornia" or "Khollyfornians" six times in this TV ad archived at his campaign website.

«» (0) comments

Via Drudge: NYSE website hacked?

Via Drudge: The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not tumble 1206.50 points today to 8448.10. But that's what the NYSE website shows right now. Drudgereport says it's a hack. (Also, screenshot.)

«» (0) comments

Leading Indicator: Traffic

CNET News.com: Upturn may be driving Silicon Valley traffic

«» (0) comments

GOP Senator Norm Coleman Seeks Lower Downloading Penalties

Guardian Unlimited: Senator Seeks Lower Downloading Penalties

Way to go, Norm.

It's legally and economically absurd to hit casual individual copyright violators with the jaw-dropping statutory damages that were originally written into the law to deter large, for-profit organized crime piracy operations.

Here's a common-sense idea: for non-commercial copyright violations by individuals, penalities ought to be limited to actual damages, or some lowish multiple (2-5x) of same.

«» (0) comments

Wifi Wiki Hifi III: The "Bass-Station"

At the O'Reilly Network, I write: Wifi Wiki Hifi III: The "Bass-Station"

«» (0) comments

Digital Media Jewelry

Coming from Nokia in early 2004: Nokia Medallion I -- a necklace which uses a tiny screen to display images you upload to it.

We're still roughly on pace for my prediction from last year: By about 2010, it will be possible to wear a complete copy of all music ever recorded as a piece of jewelry, perhaps a bracelet or an oversized earring.

«» (0) comments

Full-color, video-speed electronic paper

Nature: Electronic paper reaches video speed: Colour movies might soon be playing on single sheets

«» (0) comments

Voluntary Compulsories and Voucher Socialism for Creative Output

AaronSw: Fixing Compulsory Licensing

In a followup to his Privacy, Accuracy, Security: Pick Two post, outlining some of the inherent problems of "compulsory licensing" schemes, Aaron Swartz outlines a decentralized way to allocate compulsory levies to creators, based on digital cash.

LawMeme calls this a "Proto Whuffie", after the reputation-currency in a Cory Doctorow novel, but since this involves real cash, it's actually more like the sorts of voucher systems often proposed (and sometimes implemented) when policymakers believe that too little consumption of a particular class of goods would occur otherwise, but they still want to leave production of the goods and allication of the expenditures to the individual decisions of private actors.

Examples include food stamps -- to boost consumption of food, both for the benefit of the poor and for food businesses (the US Dept. orf Agriculture, not the Department of Welfare, administers the food stamp program) -- and school tuition vouchers -- to boost spending on youth education above what parents in a private education market might spend. The general approach has sometimes been denigrated as "voucher socialism," especially in the context of debates over school vouchers among economic libertarians, but in most cases, a voucherized market should be better than command-and-control socialism, where a small group of bureaucrats allocate (or set the politically-gamed formulas for allocation) of involuntary payments.

In the creative compensation/compulsory licensing sphere, this proposal could work out to "compulsory payment but voluntary allocation," and would form the least objectionable "compulsory licensing" scheme of all I've seen proposed.

In particular, it could reduce the chances that cartels of those who are already well mobbed-up with the federal government (copyright, broadcast, telecom, and government-contracting giants) could rig the whole system for their own eternal enrichment, small creators be damned.

Vouchers could also minimize, but not eliminate, the possibility that a compulsory license fees would be denied to controversial forms of art, like disfavored political viewpoints and "obscene" material (eg "nazi pornography").

There remain the problems of all voucher systems: some people will pretend to be of the recipient class -- in this case creators -- to be able to collect and convert vouchers to cash. Even among "true" creators, a de facto exchange rate between vouchers and cash will emerge, at which a person can reliably "sell" their vouchers, rather than giving them as a reward for creative output. But I know I'd prefer these problems to a system of total monitoring and bureaucratic, formulaic allocation, and perhaps compulsory proponents would prefer these problems to not having compelled payment for digital art at all.

[You can comment at an identical post at OReillyNet.]

«» (0) comments

Stem cells into (unprecedented?) sperm cells

AP via Drudge: Stem Cells Grown Into Sperm Cells

This story is a bit short on details; are these generated sperm cells haploid (having unpaired chromosomes, only half of the full complement of an multicelled adult) or diploid, like a *fertilized* egg rather than regular sperm? Was the stem cell donor male or female?

Diploid and/or female-derived sperm cells could force some boggling new permutations to be considered in the debates over stem cell research, therapeutic cloning, and engineered reproduction.

«» (0) comments

Neologism Department: There are lawsuits, and then there are "lawzoots."

NYTimes via Drudgereport: To Fox, 'Fair and Balanced' Doesn't Describe Al Franken

FoxNews objects to Al Franken's latest book title: "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." They're suing because they've used "Fair and Balanced" as a tagline for years; they've also registered it as a trademark.

People may get hot and bothered about this; op-ed ink will be spilled; weblog bytes will flow.

But this isn't a real lawsuit. It's a "lawzoot."

What's a lawzoot?

A phony (or bluffed) legal action pursued solely for the free publicity it generates. This lawzoot is already a bonanza for Al Franken. His book is shooting up the Amazon sales rankings.

It will also be a bonanza for Fox News. Whether you love them or hate them, this false controversy reminds you to watch them, to be pleased or outraged, as the case may be. Fox News climbed to the top of cable news by understanding that entertainment, strong viewpoints, and controversy draw audiences, and this lawzoot is just another conscious addition to their programming lineup.

Al Franken and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes will be congratulating each other (in private) over this mutually-beneficial free-media bonanza for many years.

(The recent Spike Lee vs. Viacom/SpikeTV action was also most probably a lawzoot!)

«» (0) comments

If not DARPA, Ireland

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in cooperation with outside partners, recently stepped into a political and media firestorm over its plan to offer a prediction-futures market in events like terrorist and rogue-state attacks and middle-east instability. Some politicians even want heads to roll over the plan, now cancelled.

But the core idea is quite old. I recently read The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner and published in 1975, and it features much the same idea as planned by DARPA.

In Rider, government-run "delphic pools" on an Internet-like network allow mass gambling on all sorts of political/social/economic outcomes.

The pools are used by those in power to both predict developments and measure/shape public opinion, and it is revealed late in the book that the payoffs are sometimes manipulated to mislead the public about actual likelihoods. (Though, compared to all the other levers available to a corrupt government, that could be a mighty expensive means of propaganda, and would constantly enrich those who see through the fake odds.)

Shockwave Rider was explicitly inspired by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970), so perhaps the same idea originally appeared there.

Congressional indignation in this case may stop DARPA from launching such a market... but as with any other ripe concept, it will probably just shift elsewhere. United Kingdom bookies already have a long tradition of offering bets on politics and current events, and other more marginal legal jurisdictions (like the Carribean) love to offer novel internet gambling services.

Already, at an Irish website called TradeSports they're offering markets in futures contracts which will pay off $10 each if...

• Saddam is "neutralized" by Sep03/Dec03
• Osama is "neutralized" by Sep03/Dec03
• WMDs are found in Iraq by Sep03
• The US "Alert Level" is Red/Orange/Yellow/Blue/Green at the end of Sep03/Dec03
• Gray Davis is Governor of California at the end of Sep03/Dec03/Mar04
• Kobe Bryant goes to trial
• Kobe Bryant is found guilty

This isn't so far from the DARPA idea: if TradeSports were just to offer a few less tasteful contracts naming specific dead leaders and terrorist/revolutionary/aggressive events, it'd be the whole shebang.

Right now, traders are pretty high on Saddam's capture by the end of the year (it costs 60-70 units to win 100), but low on either WMDs being found or Osama being captured soon (it costs less than 30 units to win 100 if these come to pass).

Sentiment is slightly against Gray Davis still being California's governor at the end of 2003 -- with the implied likelihood hovering in the 40-44% range. In other domestic political futures, Kerry is still the favorite to be the 2004 Democratic nominee, Justice Stevens is the favorite to be the next Supreme Court Justice to retire, and Bush is about a 2:1 favorite to win reelection in 2004.

TradeSports is a for-profit enterprise, but evidence from the Iowa Electronic Markets, a non-profit domestic research project allowing real-money bets in similar political questions has, over more than a decade, demonstrated that market mechanisms can predict political outcomes earlier and more reliably than polls and individual experts.

«» (1) comments

I Want My Wifi Wiki Hifi!

At O'ReillyNetwork, I note how recent product offerings bring the Wifi Wiki Hifi concept closer to reality.

«» (0) comments

Out-of-this-World Product Placement

At O'ReillyNetwork I ponder: who should be paying and who should get paid when Warner Brothers cartoon characters appear on NASA mission logos?

«» (0) comments

Madonna Gives (And Gets) Guerrilla Infowar

For her latest album's cover, Madonna strikes a pose reminiscent of Alberto Korda's famous photo of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary who wrote a book on guerrilla warfare that's still in print.

Madonna's team has embraced unconventional tactics to thwart internet sharing of the new album's tracks before its official release -- such as flooding sharing networks with phony tracks which feature Madonna cursing at downloaders: "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

The internet's indigenous info-guerrillas have responded by remixing Madonna's tantrum to a techno beat:

Via HTTP from DigitalCutupLounge:
Digital_Cutup_Lounge_vs_Madonna-What_The_Fuck.mp3

Magnet & metadata options:
Digital_Cutup_Lounge_vs_Madonna-What_The_Fuck.mp3 ( Bitzi Ticket Info )

Further, Undercover Media of Australia reports that Madonna.com was hijacked to provide free MP3 downloads of all the album's tracks over the weekend.

As of this writing, madonna.com is unresponsive -- and there's no telling if this "hack" was an actual pro-sharing guerrilla raid or a publicity-stunt PsyOp from the Madonna regime.

«» (0) comments

Linux Plays the Field

Kevin Bedell wins his time slot across the key demos with his offbeat reimagining of "The Bachelor" which places Linux in the starring role. An excerpt:

And HP chimed in, "That California girl, Sun, had her old boyfriend Solaris drop her off at the airport on the way here. She's definitely on the rebound." HP was stunning in an evening gown and heels, but was still carrying a football. "Hey Linux, let's you and I go play some catch! You can be my 'Mr. Touchdown' any day!".

Read the whole thing at "Linux is... the Bachelor!"

«» (1) comments

Just in time for Easter: Peepza, the Peep-topped pizza

Look upon my culinary innovation, ye Mighty, and despair:

Can I patent this? Or do I have to register it with the FDA? I don't know.

«» (0) comments

Iraqis Need Hippos

These people...

Iraqi women reach out with empty water containers as British soldiers arrive to supply the outskirts of Iraqi's southern city of Basra with drinking water, Friday, April 4, 2003. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

...clearly need Hippo water rollers:

Rollers may even offer landmine protection -- though they are "not recommended as a de-mining device."

«» (0) comments

Winona: Transparent Before Transparent Was Cool

Last entry on the skirts, I promise. You know who was way ahead of the transparent skirt curve, last October? Winona Ryder.

«» (0) comments

Skirtrepreneurship

Wow. As of right now, I'm the #1 Google hit for "transparent skirts." (See entry, two spots down.) Guess that Google-Blogger acquistion firehosed a bunch of Googlejuice onto Blogspot-hosted blogs like mine.

In other transparent skirt news, yet another blogger -- UmamiTsunami -- agrees that even though these started out as a hoax, they're sure to become real soon. She writes:

but the fact remains - someone needs to make this skirt, because i guarantee that hundreds, if not thousands, of american girls will want them. including me.

but, uh, could i get halle berry's ass silkscreened on mine? that would be swell.

The net reifies offbeat ideas. It's practically a Forbidden Planet. I tell ya. Beware the Monster from the Id!

«» (0) comments

Interwoven Celebrates Imbecilic Patent Grant

Web content management company Interwoven is touting a recently-granted patent (#6,505,212) on a multi-user, multi-staged versioning system for website development. From the patent abstract:

A system and method for file management is comprised of hierarchical files systems, referred to as "areas." There are three types of areas: work areas, staging areas, and edition areas. A work area is a modifiable file system, and, in a work area a user can create, edit, and delete files and directories. A staging area is a read-only file system that supports select versioning operations. Various users of work areas can integrate their work by submitting the contents of their work area to the staging area. In the staging area, developers can compare their work and see how their changes fit together. An edition is a read-only file system, and the contents of a staging area are virtually copied into an edition to create a frozen, read-only snapshot of the contents of the staging area. One use of the system and method for file management is as a website development tool.

Um, that description would cover the use of any moderately-featured source-code control system for web development. That's the first thing anyone with experience in coding projects tried for controlling web content in the early-to-mid-90s. We used Microsoft SourceSafe to version our intranet and public internet websites at Activerse by late 1996 (maybe even earlier), and I'm sure many others were using other filesystem-backed version-control software similarly even earlier. Interwoven filed this patent in 1998.

Sometimes the abstract isn't fair; the claims of a patent -- which are after all the only part that legally matters -- may elucidate the novelty and usefulness of an invention more effectively. But that's not the case here. Each of the patent's 13 claims just further describes what was already common practice for software and technical documentation development a decade or more ago -- and what many teams independently adopted as their practices for web file management throughout the 90s.

Interwoven wasted their money pursuing this absurd patent for an obvious and non-novel system. Let's see if they waste any more money trying to enforce it -- or if instead this patent just goes into that limbo where it remains legally valid but not credible enough to risk enforcing. (I suspect that tens of thousands of granted patents, perhaps even a majority of all unexpired patents, fall into this same limbo category.)

«» (0) comments

"Transparent" Skirts Likely Fakes -- At Least For Now!

A reasoned consensus seems to be emerging that the "transparent" Japanese skirts are just digitally altered photos, in actuality neither see-through material nor a painted-on-fabric trompe d'oeil.

But now that the idea is loose, some enterprising souls, somewhere, will surely whip up truly transparent skirts, or the painted version, or both. It's the nature of the web to propagate, magnify -- and finally, reify -- such novel concepts.

So these photos aren't so much a hoax as they are mockups -- a sort of product proposal, thrown out into the noosphere, and another example of the LazyWeb in action.

«» (0) comments

Iraqis On The War

NYTimes: When the Enemy Is a Liberator

But when it was suggested that they could hardly wish to be liberated by a country they distrusted so much � that they might prefer President Bush to extend the United Nations weapons inspections and stand down the armada he has massed on Iraq's frontiers � they erupted in dismay.

"No, no, no!" one man said excitedly, and he seemed to speak for all. Iraqis, they said, wanted their freedom, and wanted it now. The message for Mr. Bush, they said, was that he should press ahead with war, but on conditions that spared ordinary Iraqis.

Dr B Khalaf in The Guardian (UK): ...And why I will not [march]

I write this to protest against all those people who oppose the war against Saddam Hussein, or as they call it, the "war against Iraq". I am an Iraqi doctor, I worked in the Iraqi army for six years during Iraq-Iran war and four months during Gulf war. All my family still live in Iraq. I am an Arab Sunni, not Kurdish or Shia. I am an ordinary Iraqi not involved with the Iraqi opposition outside Iraq.

I am so frustrated by the appalling views of most of the British people, media and politicians. I want to say to all these people who are against the possible war, that if you think by doing so you are serving the interests of Iraqi people or saving them, you are not. You are effectively saving Saddam. You are depriving the Iraqi people of probably their last real chance get rid of him and to get out of this dark era in their history.

«» (0) comments

More Evidence for Contagious Longevity

Wired News: Discovering a Secret of Long Life

Wow, Thursday featured a mini epidemic of stories with support for a pet theory of mine, that there exist a wide range of mostly-undiscovered viruses (and perhaps other contagions) whose net effects on health and longevity are positive. Below, I highlighted the discovery that a benign viral infection can interfere with HIV's damaging effects. Now, as reported in the Wired News article above, it turns out that people living to be over 100 are five times more likely to have a specific mutation in their mitochondrial DNA.

Such DNA resides in the tiny mitochondria substructures inside each cell, and this DNA is generally believed to be inherited strictly from one's mother -- since the mother's donated egg cell (with its mitochondria) is the progenitor of every cell in the body, while the father's donated sperm cell is considered to merge its genetic payload with the egg nucleus and then drop out of the picture. However, here's the kicker about this specific longevity-correlated mitochondrial DNA mutation:

To see whether the mutation is inherited, the team studied skin cells collected from the same individuals between nine and 19 years apart.

In some, both samples showed that the mutation already existed, while in others, it either appeared or became more abundant during the intervening years. These results suggest that some people inherit the mutation from their mother, while others acquire it during their lifetime, Attardi said.

How does someone acquire a mutation during their lifetime? Viruses. So while the chain of causation is still far from clear, these results are consistent with the idea that some of these centenarians were infected with viruses which changed their mitochondrial DNA, and perhaps even enhanced their health, during their lifetime.

If this mechanism for improved health is confirmed, I want me some o' them viruses! Will the healthy elderly some day find their blood to be a valuable commodity -- an 'all-natural' patent medicine for an indeterminately wide spectrum of maladies? (Might any mysteriously effective traditional medical practices rely on the act -- even if not by conscious intent -- of transferring curative infections from old-aged medicine-men to their ailing patients?)

«» (0) comments

Anti-HIV Saluvirus Found

ABCNews (AP): Virus May Block HIV's Destructive Power

An ancient virus that has tagged along harmlessly through human evolution appears to improve people's chances of surviving AIDS by blocking HIV's ability to infect blood cells, new research shows.

Several recent studies have found that people who are infected with the recently discovered bug, called GB virus C, are substantially less likely than usual to die from AIDS. Experts assumed that GBV-C somehow interferes with HIV, but just how this protection works has been a mystery.

Now experts think they have the answer: It thwarts HIV's ability to infect cells by wiping away one of the chemical docking posts that HIV needs to make its entry.

I think we'll find a lot of subtly beneficial contagions once we seriously start to look for them. It may become common practice someday to survey the full complement of commensal flora in healthy, long-lived people to find new beneficial infectious agents -- or even to intentionally transfuse the blood from healthy, long-lived people to the young or ill, in the hopes of transferring contagious good health, even without knowing precisely which agents are salubrious. (I've written about this before, where I also suggested the term saluvirus for health-giving viruses.)

«» (0) comments

MusicBrainz Outta Beta!

MusicBrainz, an open, community-built music "metadatabase", today launches its services to a larger audience.

The website has a fresh look and more details than ever before about the history, progress, and future of this public resource. The White Paper on MusicBrainz's plans to become a self-sustaining non-profit corporation is especially informative.

New with this launch is also an innovative triple-licensing strategy. First, recognizing the important principle that facts are not copyrightable, MusicBrainz explicitly affirms that the factual information in its database is in the public domain, free for all to use.

Second, in a compact with its community of volunteer contributors, it offers all original/derived/authored materials in its database under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Finally, when commercial initiatives seek to use the MusicBrainz data, case-by-case commercial licenses will be offered in return for financial sponsorship which allows the project to continue.

This three-track approach attempts balances the public interest, contributor desires, and the long-term health of the MusicBrainz project, and could become a model for other not-for-profit community-authored projects.

I'm rooting for this innovative model -- and if you are too, you can join me and other supporters by contributing your time, money, or expertise directly to MusicBrainz. (I just PayPal'd $50...)

«» (0) comments

"Creative" Mac-heads get cut all the slack...

The Smoking Gun: Dude, You're Getting A Cell

Dell spokesdude Benjamin Curtis was arrested late Sunday (2/9) in Manhattan on a marijuana possession charge.

And yet Apple "switcher" Ellen Feiss still walks the streets as free (and probably as high) as a bird.

«» (0) comments

Warsharing? Sony Announces WiFi Portable File Server

I can't read the Japanese, but from the Flash animation, it appears that Sony is offering a 20GB portable WiFi file server.

German site Computerwoche ("Computer Week") has more information, in article: Sony announces WiFi Fileserver in the Walkman format (Google translation):

MUNICH (COMPUTER WEEK) - Japanese electronics company Sony has a portable file server presented which, which kommunziert over Wireless LAN with PCS and PDAs. The "Fsv-pg1" works with a Linux based operating system and contains a 20-GB-Festplatte in the 2,5-Zoll-Format, 17 GB of it is available for user data. The equipment fits with masses of 83 x 155 x of 31 millimeters loosely into a hand and weighs 390 gram. For the enterprise all thing a power pack is necessary, the internal Akku serves only for baking UP purposes.

The inserted ACCESS POINT (IEEE 802.11b) can serve according to manufacturer up to 250 users at the same time. Access to the stored files is possible over ftp, CIFS (Common InterNet file system) or NFS. By a Ethernet Cradle available as accessories the equipment can connect accessing Clients by WLAN in addition with the InterNet. As safety functions the Fsv-pg1 incoming inspection coding with alternatively 64 or 128 bits offers, stored files can by password be protected.

On the Net&Com 2003 in Tokyo the equipment is presented today to the public for the first time. It is to come at the end of March for converted 585 dollar on the Japanese market, the Cradle costs again scarcely 60 dollar. Whether and when the equipment appears also in this country, is not well-known.

You might call the kind of drive-by file sharing enabled by such devices "warsharing".

«» (0) comments

5:52am Saturday: Space Shuttle reentry (may be) visible from SF Bay area

SF Chronicle: Space shuttle may provide a sky show -- But overhead clouds could spoil local viewing

Although the forecast isn't great, a break in the clouds should reveal the shuttle's blazing re-entry into the earth's atmosphere more than 40 miles high and speeding at 15,500 mph.

According to the latest NASA calculations, the shuttle should first appear like a bright meteor at 5:52 a.m., visible almost due north to observers from Clearlake to San Jose. In less than a minute, as it flies toward the northeast, it will vanish, and 23 minutes later it will land at Cape Canaveral, 2,500 miles away.

Three to five minutes after the shuttle passes, observers on the ground may hear or even feel a faint sonic boom as it flies faster than the speed of sound.

I've seen this reentry before from Austin -- I had thought only more southern locales were in the path -- and it's spectacular. Some photos of a reentry over Houston are on the web, but they don't really do it justice.

«» (0) comments

Updating the UN Security Council

To better represent the world as it is, rather than the way it was at the close of World War 2, the roster of five "permanent members" of the UN Security Council should be updated. Britain's seat can become a new European Union seat, and France's seat can be transferred to the newest "Great Power": Texas.

«» (0) comments

Yao More Than Ever

It seems that the NBA Houston Rockets' Chinese rookie, Yao Ming, brings to mind cell phones nearly as much as he does basketball.

NYTimes: Fans in Shanghai Are Voting in the Mainstream

There are other examples [of how small the world is becoming]. In South Korea last summer, hundreds of Chinese men and women (bankers, brokers, even a fashion journalist) traveled to China's first game in a World Cup. They wore the latest clothing and chatted on cellphones.

"I've had seven cellphones already myself," Yao said Friday. "China is changing and developing at a rapid pace. All I can say is that I hope my development as a basketball player can match that. While China learns more about the world, I hope that the world will also learn more about China."

Slate: He's a Bust! No, Wait; He's the Next Shaq!

And while the Rookie of the Year award is already engraved with Yao's name, he doesn't deserve to win it. At 20, Phoenix's Amare Stoudemire is a far more advanced player. His ferocious dunks make the ESPN highlights, but it's his spacing and non-stop movement that make him so hard to guard. Yao found this out first-hand Wednesday when Stoudemire dropped 24 points and 13 rebounds on the Rockets, including an in-your-face dunk on big man; Yao settled for a quiet 11 points and seven boards. If only Stoudemire could sell mobile phones to 1.2 billion Chinese, he'd have a shot at beating Yao for the year-end hardware.

(An earlier NYTimes piece on Yao Ming, last December, noted that when his games are broadcast in China, the viewing audience could be larger than the entire population of the United States.)

«» (0) comments

Does the Eldred Decision Mean Trouble for the DMCA?

Jack M. Balkin, a professor of constitutional law and the first amendment at Yale, finds a silver lining in the Eldred decision in his weblog entry, Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft? (permalink).

Excerpts:

The key holding of Eldred is that �when ... Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.� The reason for this is that fair use and idea/expression provide �built-in free speech safeguards,� which �are generally adequate to address� the problem that copyright makes reproducing certain speech illegal.

...

Well, what happens if Congress decides to �alter[] the traditional contours of copyright protection,� by greatly restricting fair use, or begins to offer protection to ideas in the guise of protecting mere expression? In that case, �further First Amendment scrutiny� would be necessary. If Ginsburg does not mean this, then its hard to see what her argument amounts to other than a blank check to Congress to rewrite copyright law any way it wants.

And that brings us to the DMCA. As many people know, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act creates a new species of intellectual property protection, sometimes called �paracopyright,� that protects not copying itself but the creation of various devices and technologies that might be used to facilitate copying by circumventing copyright management devices. The DMCA prohibits the distribution of technologies that circumvent copyright management devices, and the Second Circuit has held that it reaches even linking to sites where such technologies may be found. Moreover, the DMCA protects copyright management devices from circumvention even if these devices are employed deliberately to prevent people from using copyrighted materials in ways completely consistent with fair use.

Does the DMCA �alter[] the traditional contours of copyright protection�? Yes, it does, in two respects. First, it creates a new property right that allows copyright owners to do an end run around fair use, effectively shrinking the public domain. Second, it extends that property right to prohibit the use and dissemination of technologies that would protect fair use and vindicate fair use rights. Congress has exceeded the traditional boundaries of copyright protection, superimposing a new form of intellectual property protection that undermines the �built-in free speech safeguards� crucial to the holding in Eldred. Hence, under the logic of Eldred, the DMCA is constitutionally suspect.

So even while Eldred has forced the battle over statutory copyright terms back to the Congress, it may have bolstered the prospects for constitutional challenges of the DMCA.

«» (0) comments

Arnold Kling Misinterprets Creative Commons

Arnold Kling at TechCentralStation: Content is Crap

Perhaps misled by the constant refrain of the Creative Commons animated presentation -- "It's easy when you skip the intermediaries" -- Arnold Kling interprets the CC liberal licensing ethos as being primarily a defense against content being "stolen by the evil media companies." In fact, it's nothing of the sort. By disclaiming certain of the rights copyright grants authors, under certain conditions, you could even say that the CC licenses make it *easier* for third parties to "steal" (repurpose, redistribute, reuse) creative works.

The filtering duty provided by current publishers Kling highlights is important -- but in a system of strong copyrights, many novel highly effective filtering, distribution, and promotion avenues can be precuded, because casual handling of a work is prevented by the default copyright conventions. For example, your biggest fans may be reluctant to forward your work to others, via email/blogs/P2P. You couldn't even feed many works through the sorts of "bayesian filtering" algorithms Kling favors, as that might trample certain creator's copy-control rights.

The kinds of liberal licensing -- or outright public-domain donations -- promoted by CC enable thousands of flexible new filtering roles, processes, and technologies to be tried. Many -- probably most -- won't prove any better than the old linear value-chain fed through publishers. But some will outcompete the traditional process, at least for certain works and certain audiences, because the net does many-to-many better than any system rooted in the physical world.

Liberal CC-style licensing isn't the enemy of novel, useful, expert content-filtering: it's filtering's greatest friend.

«» (0) comments

RIAA Disclaims Support For Legislative DRM Mandates

The New York Times: Music Companies Agree to Antipiracy Plan

Despite the headline spin, the main development here seems to be that the RIAA has agreed to oppose government mandates for copy-control technology in all digital media devices. The prime example of such mandate proposals would be last year's Senator Hollings-sponsored "CBDTPA."

The CBDTPA was a technologically and economically illiterate proposal from the start: more of a boogeyman than something with a real chance of being adopted. The new Republican Senate majority made it even less likely that such mandates would receive a serious hearing in Congress. Still, it's nice to see even the measure's natural constituency -- the record industy -- write it off as a lost cause, in the grand scheme of their strategy for protecting their interests. They've left their friends at the MPAA in an untenable lobbying position.

«» (0) comments

"Hey, don't empty that beaker... it's my MP3 collection!"

New Scientist magazine reports that scientists have stored text data in the DNA of living bacteria -- and then recovered the message after a hundred generations of reproduction:

The scientists took the words of the song It's a Small World and translated it into a code based on the four "letters" of DNA. They then created artificial DNA strands recording different parts of the song. These DNA messages, each about 150 bases long, were inserted into bacteria such as E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans.

No word yet on if they've searched the DNA of creatures in the wild for pre-existing messages from ancient extraterrestrials.

Lawyers from Disney and the Harry Fox Agency have sent a "cease and desist" letter to the E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans demanding that they immediately stop reproducing Disney's copyrighted lyrics. At 7 cents a copy, the petri dish of ever-dividing bacteria now owes $24 trillion in mechanical licensing fees, and counting.

«» (0) comments

Jack Ass vs. Jackass: Man named "Jack Ass" suing Viacom for "Jackass" (the movie and TV show)

The Smoking Gun: In re the matter of: Jack Ass, Plaintiff, and Viacom International Inc., Defendants

A Montana man who changed his name from Bob Craft to Jack Ass in 1997 is suing Viacom. He writes in his complaint:

Viacom International, through the use of MTV jackass (Johnny Knoxville / P. J. Clapp), is liable for injury to my reputation that I have built and defamation of my character which I have worked hard to create.

Jack Ass has a website where he promotes his (planned?) beer, which features a reminder to use a designated driver on the label. Jack is also graduate of Budweiser Beer School.

«» (0) comments