Copyrighteous

Presumably, the women (and the few men) who wear make-up apply it so that they will look more beautiful in public. What makes me wonder is the fact that these same people often see no problem with applying or touching up their make-up — in public — making faces similar to these:

(Dramatization)

I think that publicly showing these sorts of faces undoes much of the positive effect that the make-up might subsequently have.

Here's a set of two signs in front of a vase that Damog and I found at the Museum of the Zona Arqueológica del Templo Mayor in Mexico city. Yes, that's a sign in braille.

Keep thinking about it. It's an intriguing juxtaposition on several levels.

I am writing this from the plane returning from Veracruz, Mexico where I gave a keynote talk on Ubuntu at GULEV's Congreso de Software Libre. The keynotes at the conference were given by Randall Schwartz, Maddog Hall, Richard Stallman and myself talking about Ubuntu. Another Ubuntu developer asked me, "you were in parentheses, right?" Well, apparently not! There was massive turnout for the talk which went extremely well and generated a lot of energy that culminated in what nearly turned into a physical tussle over who got the last Ubuntu CDs. It was an honor to share the stage with both the other keynote speakers and the local Mexican hackers and just to be able to address the extremely interested and active Mexican Free Software community. I had a great time and hope I can make it next year.

In any case, direct from the parentheses, I've got notes and slides for folks that want to derive and present Ubuntu at their own LUG or who just couldn't make it and would like to know what happened:

• Slides are in the following format: HTML, PDF, Openoffice.org Impress

• Talk notes for the narrative part of the talk: HTML, ReST

For the last bit of the talk, I should have paid attention to the two cardinals rules of technical talk-giving:

1. Doing a live demonstration of software is an invitation to Murphy's law.
2. Doing an untested demonstration -- for example, an install onto untested hardware -- basically eliminates any ambiguity about Murphy's appearance in rule 1.

I didn't. I did an Ubuntu install, on the projector, onto a brave soul's laptop. Through a stroke of luck (and the hard work of everyone in Debian and Ubuntu who ironed out all the bugs), it worked perfectly and gave me the opportunity to highlight many things I didn't make it to in the formal talk.

Point 1:

I was vegetarian for several years. I had two major reasons: I was worried about alienation of myself from the process of meat production (of the "sausage comes from supermarkets" variety) and because I thought eating meat was inefficient. My efficiency argument was basically that, "one could produce many pounds/kilos of human edible food products in the same amount of land/effort/etc that it took to produce the grain necessary to feed the animals that produced a single pound/kilo of meat."

Along these lines, I would sometimes eat a bit of meat if it would otherwise be thrown away; wasted meat was worse than no meat at all.

Point 2:

I think murder is bad. Period. It's worth considering deterrents.

In a kinky, and wholly inappropriate combination of these two positions, it would seem that killing people is not only bad, but very inefficient. We might help undue some of this bad by punishing murderers by making them eat their victims.

Yeah, I know murder deterrents beyond what we have don't usually work but I think that this solution would make murders' think twice even in that oft-cited moment of rage.

Maybe not.

Update: I think that maybe posting this was the bad idea. :) People thought it sounded funny over a few bottles of tequila in Veracruz.

Today I learned where Chihuahua was. I haven't gone there yet but I hope to some day. I'm afraid it will be a repeat of my trip to Dalmatia; I didn't see a single dalmatian in Dalmatia -- at least not of the spotted canine variety.

I grew up in Seattle which is less than 2 hours from the Canadian border. I always thought the following idea would be a fun and enjoyable way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

A group of us could fill up a car trunk with hundreds of clear plastic bags full of white baking ingredients -- flour, sugar, baking power, baking soda, etc -- and then drive back and forth across the Canadian, US border. If stopped and searched, we would insist that we were planning on baking a whole lot of cakes.

In the absence of laws against harassing mounties and the US Customs officials, this would be a very good plan.

People think I'm joking when I say that if I ever have a child, I will name her (or him) Debian.

I'm not.

Like many others, I ordered a pile of free (as in both speech and beer) Ubuntu CDs through Ubuntu's website. My CDs were shipped via a courier service called TNT Global Express.

I think that in todays environment of oversensitivity and confusion around explosives and air travel, an air-mail courier service like TNT could have picked a better name. I can imagine some humorous confusion that I would wager the folks at Homeland Security (whose sense of humor seems to have been surgically removed in the operation to excise their critical capacity) would not find too humorous at all.

When I was at University and several times in my career as a Free/Open Source software consultant, I've been involved in crafting "Long Term Technology Plans."

I am now convinced that a long term technology plan that does not include flying cars is no long term technology plan at all.

I think that if you want to secretly insult somebody, you should call them a star. People tend to only think of stars in the sense of being refulgent or luminary. I think that the term star could just as accurately be used to imply that you think that the person is a giant ball of gas or hot air. The person being insulted will never guess.

I once lived in a rather dysfunctional apartment. One of my roommates kept the "National Bestseller," The 48 Laws of Power in the bathroom to read while he was on the toilet. During my shift in the loo, I would look over the book as well and it provided a lot of insight into its owner's personality. The book dispenses ideas from Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, Louis XIV and other wells of wisdom and gives advice on how to be more "powerful" in your daily life with such aphorisms as, "never put too much trust in friends," "crush your enemies completely," and "discover each man's thumbscrew."

The book is complete crap. I always found it somewhat humorous -- in that "it would much funnier if I didn't have to actually live with the person reading this book" sort of way -- that my 21 year old roommate thought that advice given to a monarch half a millennia ago on the virtues of totally crushing ones' enemies was highly relevant and applicable information.

I think that my roommate liked the book because it helped him rationalize being nasty to other people as a strategically important move in a bid for power. People seem to like books that explain why their faults are, in fact, strengths. If being petty and cruel is among you're faults and you're not itching to change, this may be the book for you.

Last time I was in a bookstore with friends and came across this book, my friend suggested that the rules sounded a lot like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition from the Star Trek television series. I don't have a TV but I'll betray my geekiness and admit that I've certainly watched my share of Star Trek anyway. For those that don't know, the Rules of Acquisition are the religious or societal underpinnings of an alien race that is basically Star Trek writers' imaginative rendition of a people who have made greed, selfishness and pettiness their raison d'etre. I went ahead and looked up the rules and it's true.

Here are three pairs of laws/rules:

• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 1: never outshine the master."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 33: It never hurts to suck up to the boss."
• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 99: Trust is the biggest liability of all."
• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 19: know who you're dealing with -- do not offend the wrong person."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 194: It's always good business to know about new customers before they walk in your door."

It's uncanny; you can find a match for basically every "Law" in the book.

It's a bit depressing when you find pillars of fictional dystopias being reproduced by folks with a straight-face in your own bathroom and on the New York Times bestseller list.

I'm a pretty transparent person in the "it's easy to stalk me" sense of the term. My address and phone number is on my webpage and I'm happy to post just about anything that I don't think would anger people on my blog or my website.

Once at college, I was at a party and I met and started chatting with an attractive girl for the first time but whom I was marginally acquainted with (we had a discussion-based class the year before). Things were going great and, once I had revealed my geeky-disposition, conversation stumbled onto computer mediated communication. I tried to support one of my positions with a story about when I was on BBSs in my youth. She stopped and said that she knew. Completely surprised, I asked her how she could possibly know personal events from when I was twelve and living a country away. She admitted, sheepishly, that she'd read it on my website.

True enough, I had included this particular anecdote in largely autobiographical The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning which I wrote for the small Indian publication Vimukt Shiksha and had posted on my website. As you might imagine, it caught me a little off guard when I found out that this "near strange" had read my website and it threw the "chatting up" plan for a loop.

Now I expect some people to read my website; I wouldn't bother putting things online otherwise. That said, I do not expect the girls I meet at parties to have read my website.

I've reflected a little bit on why I was shocked. I think I'm less worried about revealing embarrassing information or wrong information and more worried people will know all my good stories and examples. The worst part of this whole thing is that since then, this situation has been of my favorite stories and now it's on my website.

At the risk (read: sure thing) of appearing to self promote, I want to plug two talks I'll be giving soon:

• Tomorrow (Wednesday November 17, 2004), I'll be talking at the New York Linux User Group (NYLUG) giving a talk on customizing Debian. The talk will be about customizing in a general sense pulling from my experience with Ubuntu and in a specific CDD sense pulling sense pulling from my experience with Debian-NP. You need to RSVP to attend and should do it quickly. If you miss the RSVP, you can meet up in the bar across the street for the Real Event afterward. Details are on the NYLUG website.
• Next Friday (Friday, November 26, 2004), I'll be giving a keynote address on Ubuntu at the GULEV Congreso Internacional de Software Libre in Veracruz Mexico. It's just been finalized so it hasn't even hit the conference website as I write this. You'll need to visit the conference website for information on attending.

I know I'll see some old friends and I hope to meet some new folks as well. Feel free to get a hold of me if you'd like to meet up at either event.

I think being green -- and I do not mean this in any of the metaphorical senses of the term but rather in the sense of having skin of a green hue -- is a pretty undesirably thing overall.

That said, I'd be happy to be green if it meant I could photosynthesize.

Mika and I were comparing the names of fingers and toes in different languages we know. Mika was saying that in addition to being called kusuri yubi (薬指 or "medicine or drug finger") and benisashi yubi (紅差指 or "lipstick finger"), Japanese people also call the "ring finger" mumeishi (無名指 or "no-name finger"). I think "no-name" is a pretty great name for a finger.

If I am ever rich and if my alma mater convinces me to donate a whole bunch of money, I will do it with the stipulation that they name a hill (that's a hill, not a hall) on the campus after me. I think it would be nice to have a Hill Hill.

Bill Gates and his family donates lots of money to universities around the country and there are many Gates Halls. If I were him, I would donate the same amount of money but ask that the universities name gates, rather than halls, after me.

Imagine a school with the Gates Gates, Hill Hill, and Hall Hall. This is the type of institution of higher learning that I would trust our next generation's future to.

Sometimes people say they don't believe in things to means that they don't agree with or subscribe to a concept. Someone might say, "I don't believe in tax cuts for the wealthy." I always think for half a second, "do you not believe that they are good or do not believe they exist." It's entertaining to imagine not believing in common things that we take for granted.

If you think about it, such skepticism is is not always totally unjustified. I've heard of people that don't believe in plate tectonics which, if you think about it, is not a totally insensible thing to not believe in (although I do believe in plate tectonics myself).

I think it would be a good experiment if everyone would, for one day, act as if they don't believe in things that they have not personally seen or experienced convincing evidence of existence.

We should all spend one day in a world without big things, small things, or concepts; no germs, macroeconomics, political assassinations, and much more.

The next day we will return back to normal but I think we will all have a lot more perspective.

I have read that many snakes are immune to their own venom. This makes sense.

I think it's strange that people can be tickled with their own hair.

I recently gave a talk at Gnubies: the New York City GNU/Linux group for beginners. The talk was aimed at complete beginners so it won't have a lot of new information for anyone who is already familiar with the topics covered.

The talk discussed both Debian and Ubuntu and explored the overlap to introduce the concepts of Free Software philosophy that are important to both projects.

For those that are interested, I've posted the notes I used (I gave the talk without slides) for those that want to give their own talk in HTML and ReStructured Text source.

Putting together a realistic undersea diorama must be difficult. The diorama-maker must work to create a dynamic environment implying movement and revealing a intriguing and ascetically appealing scene. As if this weren't enough, they must also worry about balancing the fish model and getting the fish to hang at realistic angles.

This is all very difficult of course because they must also worry about carefully hiding or obscuring the supports that hold the fish in mid-air.

I think that underwater diorama makers must love the Tripod Fish (Bathypterois) pictured below.

Today I learned about black smokers. For those who (like me earlier today) do not know, black smokers are underwater mineral-rich hydrothermal vents and the large chimney like structures that form around them.

A black smoker (of the hydothermal variety) is in the first picture below. It's not to be confused with the black smoker (of the golf legend variety) in the second picture below.

In related news, I don't care how many cigarette-smoking, dark-skinned, hydrothermal vent researches there are. There are not enough.

I read a bit of news today including this report on the fact that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is going to be following in the footsteps of the RIAA and suing ordinary folks who are sharing movies online.

The recording industry's business has demonstrably taken a hit in the last decade or so. You can argue that it's not P2P's fault but it seems clear to me that P2P has had an impact. The film industry, however, is not in the same position to make these arguments which strikes me as very interesting.

I see two possibilities for their actions; I'm sure that the truth is a combination of the two.

First, the film industry suspect that at some point in the near future, their business model will become both (a) increasingly -- and perhaps totally -- dependent on digital film distribution and (b) increasingly aversely affected by film sharing online.

The second possibility is that the entertainment companies know that there is a lot more at stake that the +/- sign and the number before the percentage symbol on their annual reports. The music and film industries are the ones producing the vast majority of the content on peer-to-peer networks; that will not and can not persist if things continue the way they are going. Something will break and I'm quite sure that it will not be P2P. If nothing else (and I don't believe this is unlikely) the modern industry will have its own ability to produce in the way it does today (i.e., its business model and financial viability) ripped out from underneath it. While the industry would have you believe otherwise, this will not spell the end of either music or film. History books teach us that both existed before Michael Eisner, Ted Turner, or even Rupert Murdoch.

P2P's real power lies in its ability to distribute what can be produced (and funded) in new creative ways that are sustainable through P2P's less coercive model of distribution. The players currently dominant in the culture industries feel (rightfully) that they have little to gain from exploring this road or even finding out what it might look like.

Big music and big film has everything to lose and they must know it. They are not about to let a radically different type of distribution technology and a couple thousand years of human attitudes towards the way communities should and should not control ideas and information undermine their position of power. They will fight to install legal and technological artifice to keep the power and money they gained through the economic realities of physical distribution in the digital realm. They will spend every last billion fighting.

That brings us to back today and the MPAA's new response to what even they admit is an infantile threat of digital piracy on their business model.

I think P2P is a threat to the MPAA but not in the way that they would have you believe. Making film for theaters would be a sustainable industry; the industry did, after all, try to eliminate Betamax and VCRs altogether. But this isn't about creating sustainable industries -- with or without P2P. It's about preserving power and creating growth.

I would really like a book that documented all the potentially offensive "collisions" in the ways that different English speakers define words. For example, the book would point out the fact that "root" means something in Australia, and "fag" something in the UK, that is very different than what they mean in the US.

If I had such a book, I would travel the world making each mistake loudly and conspicuously and then blaming it on ignorance of cultural differences. Such cultural clashes can hardly be considered real transgressions and be held against anyone who convincingly acts as if it was a mistake. It would both be educational for everyone involved -- and we'd all be a little happier afterward.

As many USians have done or will do soon, I fulfilled my civic duty today. Since I vote in Washington State and have recently moved to New York City, I voted by absentee ballot.

Here's a (washed out) snapshot of the envelope that my ballot will be making its way across the country in:

You can tell, from the logo in the top middle of the envelope that it is Official Election Mail.

Here's a close up of that logo, reserved "for use by election officials" by the postal service to, as noted here, "enhance the identification and ensure proper handling of this important type of official communication." Here is a clearer shot of the logo:

You can tell, from the "TM" in the logo, that Official Election Mail is a trademark.

This is completely ridiculous. Trademark law is created to to keep consumers from being confused by manufacturers trying to unfairly capitalize off the goodwill created by one company; to allow consumers to associate a certain level of quality with a certain brand or company. There is hardly a market in Official Election Mail. As much as I would like to shop around for a better ballot when I find the choices on mine lacking, this is not the case.

I can think of any numbers of different legal ways to stop people from putting Official Election Mail logos on the top of their mail -- mail fraud and election tampering are simply the first two that come to mind. Trademarks (and every branch of IP for that matter) were created as limited and narrowly defined legal instruments to fulfill a particular purpose. They were not all-purpose ways to keep people from saying things you rather they not say. This is not a trademark issue and it doesn't need to be.

By asserting a trademark in a place where one is not necessary and where historically trademarks would not be used, it's a symptom and a reinforcement of the the "IP for everything" culture. It is an expansion and an abuse.

Trademarks still strike me as mostly pro-consumer and they're the arm of intellectual property law that I have the least significant problems with. This sort of thing makes me reconsider that position.