brainwagon

Dave Slusher was musing about a peculiar statistic of his audio blogging experiments: all the commentors appear to be male. That set me to wondering what the statistics of your average blogger was. Luckily, Livejournal maintains statistics that I found rather interesting. Despite Dave’s experience, on LiveJournal only one in three bloggers who chose to […]

My email server has been up for just four days, and is mentioned only in a single post on my weblog. Today I received the first of what I suspect will be many spam emails. Their product? Advancement of your business by direct e-mail marketing. We offer e-mail mass mailing to any country. In other […]

Sometimes a single sentence is enough to kick your brain into thinking about things in a different way than you have before. This rant was keyed off the sentence “There is no limit to the amount of energy an industrialized society will use per capita”. I’d never really thought of it in precisely this way […]

Bush TV ad targets Kerry on intelligence issues Boy, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.

Well, I’ve been busy this weekend helping my son repaint his room. It’s now a lovely sky blue, with faux-finished images of clouds painted all around. It’s really quite restful, but it took the better part of both days to finish. I’ve had precious little time for anything else, and I’m too tired to write […]

The Register reports that the CBO is advising Congressmen that Digital Rights Management is good for America. Well, for American business anyway. It is surprising (well, maybe not surprising, perhaps just disappointing) that the CBO completely ignores the central questions at the core of current discussions about copyright and instead lodges their heads firmly in […]

Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and a half watching the video download, and thought it was an interesting look into where CPU design is going, not going, and what that means for products. I’m not a […]

News.com is running a story about the BSA’s new mascot, a ferret who lectures children about the perils of the copyright infringement. Children will play games where they destroy pirated software and collect licensing agreements. Oh good lord. How about teaching them the real facts of our absurd copyright system? That if they go into […]

I’m nearing the end of Lessig’s Free Culture, and am at the point in the book where Lessig describes his loss in Eldred v. Ashcroft which challenged the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is very interesting on many levels: to see how Lessig strategized, to see what arguments were made […]

Except for my occasional bleats about intellectual property rights, I try not to write very much about politics in my blog. It’s not that I don’t have political opinions: I do, and many of them quite strongly held. It’s simply that I write this blog mostly for my own amusement, and talking about politics and […]

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 […]

The Python Daily URL! feed has had quite a few articles lately on the so-called “decorator” syntax. I must admit, I’m not really up on the controversy, but I was amazed that even after reading three or four posts, I still couldn’t figure out what the intended utility of the new feature was supposed to […]

The Sasser and Netsky viruses accounts for 70% of the virus reports in 2004, yet were written by one person: German hacker Sven Jaschan. Sven, get a girlfriend for crissakes.

Paul Graham posted Great Hackers, an adaptation of his keynote OSCON 2004 speech. He’s also the author of Hackers and Painters, which I haven’t read yet, but probably will pick up shortly. His comments to me seem rather thought provoking, but should be tempered a bit by a sense of humility. For instance, in talking […]

The Internet has been abuzz with comments about Senator Orrin Hatch’s INDUCE Act, which would criminalize any activity that “induces” copyright infringement as if it were actually copyright infringement. I doubt I could say anything about it which has not been said elsewhere, but it’s a law that would eviscerate the 1984 Supreme Court decision […]