brainwagon

The people of Dover, Pennsylvania recently had an election for their local schoolboard. In a fairly close election, every member of the school board that supported the addition of intelligent design to their school curriculum was voted out, all eight of them. What did Pat Robertson have to say about the free exercise of people’s […]

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger Windows isn’t what whas broken. Windows DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES were what was broken. The two are intimately related. Can you honestly say that you have an example of a program which worked well, despite the development process being completely broken? It just doesn’t happen. The article that Scoble quoted quoted Microsoft VP […]

Intriguing rumor that hit Wall Street today. It would be great if my favorite consumer appliance got acquired by someone who could prevent its long, slow descent into the tar pits. Of course, they’d probably change the name to iTv or something, and it would be a sterile white instead of the comforting black. Actually, […]

Wil Wheaton has some distinctly harsh words for the notion that ASCAP now will sell you a license to play music on your podcasts. Peter Kim responded that: Wil, you WOULDN’T pay for an individual song. ASCAP licenses are blanket licenses, and the interactive minimum pricing they’ve set below $300/yr. Once you have the license, […]

Michael Malone has an article which has been going around the blog circuit, hypothesizing that there may be a whiff of decay about Microsoft, that the Redmond empire may have chinks in its armor. Hey, it’s a popular idea, at least among the Open Source beatniks that I normally hang with. But we all know […]

I’m not paranoid. Damn, I just realized that by saying it, I probably am, but holy-land-o-mercy. Have people gone completely insane? A high school in Sutter California has ordered all students to wear mandatory RFID tracking tags. The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner […]

“If you’re getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you’re doing something wrong.” It’s not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks open-source programmers should work for peanuts (he doesn’t), but rather that they should be properly motivated. Call it software with a soul, if you like. Only the truly passionate […]

I know, I know, this should come as no real surprise. California legislators craft stupid, unconstitutional legislation every day. But Kevin Murray has introduced a law which would fine or imprison anyone who “sells, offers for sale, advertises, distributes, disseminates, provides or otherwise makes available” software that allows users to connect to networks that can […]

From Italy, we get this story: A real-life Scooby-Doo villain has been jailed in Italy for four months for pretending to be a ghost. And she would have gotten away with it too, had it not been for those meddlesome kids police officers with video cameras!

Lisa Williams has a terrific article on the policies and ethics which surround blogging. I’m actually most concerned with the actions of employers: the word of people being fired for the contents of their blogs frankly fills me with a bit of sadness and dread. What will the world be like if this powerful new […]

Bill Gates apparently think that those who seek to reform copyright terms are communists. The silliness of that claim has spawned a number of cool T-shirts at least, including this incredibly reasonably priced one from Giant Robot Printing. Great stuff!

I call bullsh*. Shuttle astronaut John Young made the following claim: The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You’re 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event […]

To quote Al Franken, “What is up with Ann Coulter?” Need another reason to blog? Try listening to Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. Is this the best that big media has to offer?

The Washington Times files this report on a speech by former CIA Director George Tenet. Quoting: Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said. Speaking as a citizen of the Internet, I assure you I take security very seriously. […]

Fred von Lohmann has published an interesting article on the intricacies of law surrounding the development of P2P software entitled: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law. It is a good article which tries to clearly describe what direct, contributory and vicarious liability means, and how developers can potentially avoid legal pitfalls in […]