brainwagon

Some things just make you blink. A Day in the Life is reporting that MSN is only blocking the words democracy and freedom in the name of a blog, the post title, and the URL, but NOT in the body copy. Hmmm. So much for the censorship charge if this is true. Robert, did you [...]

I have a romantic view of baseball, and it is always startling when confronted with the reality that baseball is a business first, and the national pastime second. It is, after all, a game. Games have rules, and rules are to be followed. I’ll boo Sosa because he corked his bat. I’m not fond of [...]

Congressman Rick Boucher is a rare animal indeed: a man looks at the bigger picture of intellectual property and tries to determine the appropriate balance intended by the founding fathers in creating patents and copyrights. I first became aware of the Congressman when he guest blogged on Lawrence Lessig’s weblog, where he showed surprising sense. [...]

Okay, okay, it’s not really a gem, except in the sense that it’s interesting to read an early example of utter and complete mumbo jumbo. Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater is an extensive, detailed, and complete description of chemistry as revealed to the authors through clairvoyance. Published in 1919, the exact [...]

Ars Technica points us at both an article from The Economist which questioned the accuracy and methology of the BSA in determining of piracy to businesses, and the terse and unresponsive reply from Beth Scott of the BSA. Reproduced here in full: SIR — Your article on software piracy was extreme, misleading and irresponsible (“BSA [...]

Yesterday I did some thinking bout how to prevent more of the spam that floods (or at least leaks into) my sight, and decided to give a whirl to SecureImage, a plugin that implements a CAPCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) . You’ve seen these before: type in the [...]