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speaking Rightspeaking Rightspeaking Right 04/09/2004 04:06 PM The Wall Street Journal ran a review of Free Culture Friday. (I can't show you a link because on the Journal's theory of the web, it doesn't make sense to even allow searches on your website without paying first.) Great review, with an interestingly critical twist. The thrust of Stewart Baker's criticism is that my argument should be directed to the Right: That copyright law is "asbestos litigation for the Internet age." "Big Copyright," he continues, "is one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking." And he ends by mapping copyright as a wedge issue: What's to fear, that Hollywood will end its generous suppo rt of Republican candidates? And talk about wedge issues. Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation. What if the administration stood with them on this issue, proposing a cap on the damages that the industry can extract from college students for downloading music? Say, $1 a song, or even $10, instead of $150,000. Karl Rove could put that on the table, sit back and let John Kerry choose between his contributors and our kids. If that happens, Mr. Lessig could end up next to Ralph Nader in the pantheon of liberals that the Republican Party has learned to love.Of course not a result I'm eager to see (though after my sniping about Nader, perhaps one I deserve), and of course, I am, as Baker suggests, a liberal. But Baker is exactly right that this issue should play to the Right as well as to the Left. And as you'll see in this video from the Progress and Freedom Foundation debate with Jim DeLong (recorded the day before Baker's review), it is a point I've been making as well. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)speaking RightGrok Headline matches for speaking RightSpeaking of CES …Speaking of CES … 01/07/2004 06:04 PM Don't forget to check out PCMag.com's CES Center site for the latest product and technology news from Vegas all week. Speaking about Blogs....Speaking about Blogs.... 06/17/2005 07:17 PM Yesterday, Larry Sloma, who (along with Troy Swanson) helped Moraine Valley Community College get all bloggy and RSSified, sent me an email noting that he’s running a pilot project on his new library’s web site. Check out the Highland Park Public Library’s blog, which you can now have read to you.
That wasn’t enough for Larry, though. Today, I got an email from Troy, saying that Larry had also helped MVCC set this up for their blogs, too. Check out the “Click to Listen” link on the right-hand side of their Library News blog! Here’s the weird, spooky, serendipitous part. I’m reading my work email tonight (yeah, I’m that overwhelmed at work that I’m doing email from home these days), when the following message from David Mattison appears on the WEB4LIB mailing list:
That’s news to me! But, I guess if you’d rather listen to my posts than read them, here’s your chance. Speaking machines!Speaking machines! 01/04/2004 01:14 PM A brief history of speech synthesis : an interesting read, with photos and sound samples! Speaking in San JoseSpeaking in San Jose 09/20/2004 10:40 AM Calendar note for Silicon Valley folks: On the evening of Oct. 4, I'm giving a talk in San Jose, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club and San Jose State University's Department of Journalism and Mass Communications. The topic will be "The Emergence of Grassroots Journalism," and given current events there's plenty to discuss. Details here. I'm also scheduled, on Nov. 6, to be at the Barnes & Noble store on Stevens Creek Blvd. in San Jose. Details to come. Speaking of the environment...Speaking of the environment... 06/10/2004 11:08 AM I was on a road trip last weekend thru the rolling hills between Somerset, PA and Cumberland, MD, where I noticed scattered windmill technology producing clean energy. I posted my appreciation and a picture on my personal YardBoy Blog that provoked a valuable reader comment. I learned that my Rochester, NY electric utility offers a billing option that guarantees production of wind power at anyone's request. It's called [Catch the Wind] and I signed up to have my average useage "blown" into the power grid for an extra $5 per month. For $60 a year, I will reduce carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to planting 146 trees or not driving 2,338 miles. If I was a zealot, I could have purchased extra. In fact, one can support wind energy regardless of who supplies your electricity. You will receive a certificate that verifies your purchase. Speaking naturallySpeaking naturally 01/28/2004 01:12 AM Computer Times Asia Jan 28 2004 5:29AM GMT Speaking of WiFiSpeaking of WiFi 09/06/2004 01:26 AM Everybody's been talking about Pennsylvania thinking about going to an all-state, WiFi, so I thought I'd mention a press release at Michigan's Web site. Michigan has deployed WiFi at two... Speaking SearchSpeakSpeaking SearchSpeak 07/15/2004 08:43 PM Are we being trained by search engines to speak without "stop words"? More at Many2Many...... And Speaking Of Wondering...And Speaking Of Wondering... 04/19/2004 07:04 PM Anyone want to fork out $200 for a Gucci iPod case? Churches speaking out against BNPChurches speaking out against BNP 04/28/2004 02:53 AM West Yorkshire church leaders are due to sign a declaration attacking the right-wing British National Party. Speaking of inexperienceSpeaking of inexperience 07/06/2004 01:45 PM Speaking at GnomedexSpeaking at Gnomedex 06/23/2004 09:22 AM When I attended Gnomedex last year, I have to confess that I went with muted expectations. As it turned out, though, I had a great time, and rank it among the best conferences I've visited. This year, not only am I attending the conference but I'm scheduled to speak on one of the panels. Along with blogging gurus Robert Scoble, Henry Copeland and Ross Rader, I'll be discussing how to maximize your blogging strategies. I'm glad I have a couple of months to figure out what to say, because I'm not an experienced public speaker :) Among the other confirmed speakers are Steve Wozniak, Wil Wheaton and Dan Gillmor. The conference isn't until September 30 so I'll talk more about it closer to the time, but if you want to attend I recommend registering now. Unlike last year's Iowa-based Gnomedex, this year it's being held in Lake Tahoe - so I expect even more people to be there. Speaking of CronesSpeaking of Crones 01/02/2004 07:08 AM Kalilily Time kalilily.net/weblog/04/01/01/151811.html And speaking of giftsAnd speaking of gifts 12/19/2004 03:40 PM So the most significant change in my technology-related life in the last year is the elimination of spam without a white-list technology. I used to use Mailblocks for my main account, but Marc Perkel convinced me to try his own Bayesian spam filter. I'm on record saying such systems could never work. I was wrong. Marc's system is amazing. I get endless email. His system filters the mail into three boxes -- my inbox, a low probability box, and a high probability box. I have never found a mistake in the high probability box, so I no longer look at it. I very rarely find a mistake in the low probability box, so I scan it about once a week (maybe 1% error). And it is almost fun to get an error in my inbox, reminding me that there still is this problem of spam out there. Anyway, I'm giving Marc's spam filter service to my family for Christmas (no, they don't read my blog). And I'd recommend it to anyone else out there looking for a gift (note, I don't have any financial interest in this). As Marc described to me: I sell it as a service. I can do it several ways. If someone wants a single email address I can give them a something@marxmail.net account. $25/year. Or I can host their email domain for $95/year. Or I can be a front end spam filter where I clean it and pass it on to their existing email server $75/year.You can reach him for at this MarxMail address. Speaking of contests...Speaking of contests... 12/10/2003 11:24 PM The Creative Commons Moving Images Contest deadline is three weeks from today, and there are lots of great prizes. You can use Flash or video to illustrate how Creative Commons works (here's a sample of how we describe it to musicians), no more than two minutes in length. To be honest, we haven't had a ton of entries yet, so get cracking creative types! Hypothetically Speaking...Hypothetically Speaking... 03/11/2003 09:44 AM ... if there were a Safari v62, and it did happen to leak to the public, and someone did happen to run it, and that person did happen to discover a bug with text-decoration, well then I would hypothetically be most grateful, and would in fact fix such a bug with the utmost expedience. In fact, it might even be fixed already, assuming of course there were such a build, and it did in fact have this problem. Speaking in MontrealSpeaking in Montreal 03/21/2003 11:26 AM Lots of interesting things happening at the PHPQuebec Conference in Montreal. I gave my little "build a successful OSS business" speech yesterday, and it seems to have been well received.Seveal "well known" PHP folks were also there--from Rasmus Lerdorf to Zeev Suraski--with a good number of things to say and ... Speaking of French cheeseSpeaking of French cheese 04/09/2005 07:53 AM According to this article, French mobilise to save cheeses under threat of extinction France is losing cheeses as producers are dying and taking their cheese making secrets to the grave. A worrisome trend is looming in this country of cheese-lovers, where the nation's rich palette of 1,000 cheeses is being nibbled away at with the annual demise of several varieties..."The Mont-d'Or galette, which had been produced for some 400 years, disappeared this summer following the death of the last producer who knew the secret of how to make it." That does sound worrisome. What's also worrisome is the reference in this article to "National Cheese Day" on "Friday." Did I just miss National Cheese Day?!?! Why weren't there big cheese posters everywhere telling me about this? Sure, they take the time to hang a giant neon sign for the Olympics on the Hôtel de Ville, but why not a giant poster of Brique de Brebis? No wonder a disastrous cheese extinction looms! Speaking of funny IM conversationsSpeaking of funny IM conversations 07/16/2004 08:39 AM I think fake IM conversations are becoming a new legitimate form of satire. Here is one of the classics. via snowchyld Comment - TrackBackBla-Bla list - speaking of LaszloBla-Bla list - speaking of Laszlo 04/09/2005 05:50 PM From now on - you'll be seeing lots of great examples of free, open source examples of Laszlo apps. Here's teh first - the Bla-Blah list. Since Laszlo is free and Flex just raised it's price to $15k a server - there should be no issue why you wouldn't choose this superior solution. Speaking of Camino...If you are thinking
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 A week ago I provided a values self-test, and asked for your help creating a complete list of human values, ranked in order of importance. I also promised to provide my own list and rankings. The chart above is the composite of the responses. It suggests that there are nine facets to our happiness: Health, Home, Connection, Discovery, Work, Peace, Play, Awareness and Self-Esteem. Each of these has aspects that vary depending on our culture, and their relative importance varies from person to person. I've shown Family as an aspect of Connection, but for some it may be inseparable from Home. I've shown 'Work' in quotation marks because I mean it in the broader sense of 'making a living', rather than the narrow sense of employment. Again, for some people, self-styled 'home-makers', this may be inseparable from Home. And I've grouped Personal Values and Beliefs under Discovery because they're part of self-discovery, making meaning of our lives. You may quibble with my terminology and groupings, but I'm reasonably confident that this schema represents a set of Universal Human Values. In fact, I'd say it represents the values of all sentient life -- from my readings and personal study of birds, I think ravens, at least, share these nine values and strive, consciously or unconsciously, to maximize their achievement. These are the things that drive us all, that motivate all activity, and because they're all essential to survival of the species, they're probably all coded into our DNA. Alas, just because we may have a shared set of core values doesn't make it any easy to achieve agreement on how to maximize and achieve them. The answer to "How Do We Best Achieve These Things" is a function of:
So, if we cannot agree on How to achieve these values, is there even any point to agreeing on What they are? I think there is, for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it helps us to better understand and find common cause with those with different frames, since, at bottom, we're all looking for the same thing. Secondly, it can help us look rationally at our beliefs and behaviours, to assess whether they really make sense in light of what they are intended to appreciate and achieve. Here's an interesting example of the latter: One thing most liberals and most conservatives seem to agree on is the value, at least in theory, of globalization. Liberals don't like the way globalization can cause massive social and environmental damage, or how it's been abused to force third world countries to adopt Western political and economic policies and give up control of their economies, land and resources, but most believe that it is quite possible to mitigate these negatives and still reap the benefit of free movement of goods and services at market prices as a mechanism of humanitarianism and eventually economic, social and political improvement. Conservatives see globalization as the ultimate manifestation of a 'free' (unimpeded by government) economy, and as a means to export 'good' Western values, but even they are more than a little worried about a global government that they don't control (hence their loathing of the UN). What is implicit in the both the liberal and conservative worldviews of globalization's benefits is that cultural homogenization is a good thing. To the conservative, one world adhering to American values would be free of terrorism -- if we're all brought up with the same values and beliefs (and believing in the One True God) the only crime that would be left would be crimes of sloth and similar individual moral weakness, universally abhorred and 'nipped in the bud' by a uniform global 'spare the rod and spoil the child' criminal justice system. All believing the same, growing up the same, with the same 'opportunity' -- what better way to achieve World Peace? To the liberal, one world adhering to an agreed-upon consensus of laws, standards and values would be the 'UN done right', where with only one government, there would be no 'other government' to wage war on, and with a global meeting-place for sharing ideas and resolving disagreements, there would be limited support for civil war as well. These neo-liberal and neo-conservative views, though, both implicitly see cultural heterogeneity as a threat to world peace. What is interesting about this 'if we're all the same we'll get along' rationale is that it is imperialistic and utterly ignorant of the anthropological reasons why such cultural heterogeneity arose in the first place. Indeed, most anthropologists argue that man is already astonishingly culturally homogeneous already, and that cultural imperialism and cultural homogeneity have grown in near-perfect lock-step with the scale of human violence and war. In hunter-gatherer cultures, both human and animal, there is little cultural homogeneity between communities, and inter-mixing between communities is rare. Anthropologists are astonished at how tribes living just a few miles apart had rituals, beliefs, religions and even diets that were completely alien to each other, almost unimaginably different. Our civilization culture's expansion, imperialism, and language impositions have compromised these differences enormously, but they are still somewhat observable. Even after several hundred years civilization culture is so utterly alien to North American First Nations people that they have proved almost impossible to integrate and assimilate. Why would nature, and evolution have encouraged this innate heterogeneity, this xenophobia which almost inevitably leads to inter-cultural conflict? The obvious reason is resistance to disease. As AIDS has shown so horrifically, and the Plague before it, movement of people between cultures brings the risk of epidemics, and the more culturally homogeneous the species, the greater the risk that such epidemics will wipe out the entire race. This homogeneity-caused fragility is not unique to humans -- we've seen it in the Avian Flu, and the spread of Mad Cow, and the devastation that this fragility caused during the Irish Potato Famine should be enough to make us think twice about the desirability of us, and our staple foods, being increasingly genetically indistinguishable around the world, and the desirability of our being able to travel around the world and infect so many others with new exotic diseases so easily. That's the evolutionary explanation for nature's abhorrence for homogeneity, and possibly the reason we are inherently so xenophobic and intolerant of other cultures. But beyond the genetic fragility of cultural homogeneity, cultural homogeneity also brings with it memetic fragility -- a lack of variety of ideas. You can already see evidence of this poverty of imagination in corporations and cults where intellectual and behavioural conformity is strongly encouraged: no innovation, group-think leading to inflexibility and denial of the existence of problems, vulnerability to seduction by false comforts, and brainwashing. So assuming that cultural homogeneity is an inevitable consequence of globalization, at least the globalization models we've come up with so far, is the resultant genetic and memetic fragility that we would get along with 'world peace' worth all the wars and imperialistic devastation necessary to achieve it? Is the benefit of increasing Peace, one of the nine universal human values, outweighed by the commensurate reduction in Health and Home and Discovery, three of the other values? I prefer to take my learnings from nature, which may or may not be as 'smart' as we are but which demonstrated, especially prior to the advent of civilization, a remarkable resilience and ability to optimize these nine universal values, not just for pre-civilized man but for all other life on the planet as well. Nature would suggest, I think, that the answer is not One World, homogeneous, a single world political and economic and cultural system, but instead a rediscovery of community, of diversity, of the richness and strength of cultural difference, of heterogeneity. Nature would suggest that community, not nuclear family or 'household' or nation-state, is the place and level of aggregation where we will find the true meaning of Home, of Belonging, of Love and Relationship and Connection and Self-Sufficiency, and that the land and environment and all the creatures on it that constitute our Home are sacred and inviolable and belong to no one. Nature would suggest that Discovery and Learning and Personal Values and Beliefs are most effectively found by personal exploration, by trial and error, through all of our senses in the real world, not by reading textbooks in classrooms. Nature would suggest that 'Work', making a living, is done most successfully and meaningfully by cooperatively and collaboratively, as equals, beholden to no one but one's chosen partners, helping ourselves and others meet real, unmet needs. Nature would suggest that Peace comes from respecting the differences and sovereignty of other communities, in celebrating their diversity as robust and astonishing communities in the human experiment, and in trading ideas and goods reciprocally when it is necessary and to the benefit of all. Nature would suggest that Playfulness and Awareness and Self-Esteem are part of the very essence and meaning of life and that our modern civilized world which trivializes and veils and manipulates our achievement of these things turns a world of joy into a prison and cripples us as human beings. But I'm not sure I could convince a conservative, or a radical Islamist, or even a Third World child captivated by the possibility of modern American life, of this. We may share the same universal values, but we see them, and the road to their achievement, through utterly different eyes. |
...did you know that you could spend more on a power cord than you would for a brand new Gateway 510 System? Or throw in another $55 and you could get a brand new eMac.
Yes, it's true. $744 for a friggin power cord. A "Cardas Golden Reference Power Cord with Built-in Filtration" no less, but still, a power cord.
Does the US Army know about this outfit?
from Gizmodo.
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Kofi Annan is speaking now. He says that terrorism is a direct attack on human rights and the rule of law. If we destroy human rights and rule of law in the response to terrorism, they have won. Many responses to terrorism, even by those among members of the UN damage human rights. Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential. He is going to work on UN guidelines to responding to terrorism while following International human rights guidelines.
UPDATE: full text of speech. via Alvy
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