brainwagon

Todd over at Geek News Central was handing out Gmail accounts to all his loyal listeners. What a good idea! I’ve got 49 invites I could pass out to interested parties, so if your in need of a nice, big, google-y mailbox, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite as a special […]

Microsoft has released a Malicious Software Removal Tool. I thought that’s what Linux install disks did. Bad-dump-pump.

BoingBoing reports that Joshua Kingberg was arrested at the RNC in New York for operating his bicycle mounted dot matrix printer. It’s an enormously cool hack: you basically ride the bike and it leaves a message in its trail in the same way a dot matrix printer works. The message is written in a water […]

Lawrence Lessig has a link to a Bittorrent feed for the INDUCE hearings, starring the venerable Orin Hatch. I’ve ranted about INDUCE before a bit, and how it substantially modifies the Supreme Court ruling in the 1984 Betamax case. It’s not good law folks, and is yet another attempt by the content industry to further […]

Lawrence Lessig’s weblog contains a short message from Wallace McLean. He notes that in Canada every author who died before December 31, 1948 has passed into the public domain. His description of what that means is particularly poignant: As of today, millions of pages of archival heritage, in hundreds of archival institutions, have become the […]

This week has been dominated by pondering of the public domain. I ordered a book from nolo.com written by attorney Steven Fishman entitled The Public Domain: How to Find Copyright-Free Wrightings, Music, Art and More. It’s a very easy to read and well written guide to the world of copyright and the public domain, and […]

I recently spotted this article on the subject of spotting bogus science. It’s enormously easy to be hoodwinked by science, and these seven rules can help you spot the quacks from real science. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or […]

Some things you just don’t think about until they save your life. On Valentine’s Day my wife and I were awoken at 3:30 by our smoke detector going off. Yours truly, idiot that he is, had gone to bed and left a candle burning on the mantlepiece downstairs. Some hot wax had melted off and […]