Copyrighteous

I was sad to see that the local Cinderella's Pizza is open (and delivers!) past midnight. They do not serve pumpkin pizza (or any other pumpkin dishes) at any time of the night.

If I were in charge, things would be different.

Because there are people that seem to be unclear on the subject:

The reason people type "l10n" and "i18n" instead of "localization" and "internationalization" is because the words' length makes them difficult to type. Tech communities are willing to put up with this ungainly and opaque shorthand for the sake of our wrists.

In spoken English, "EYE-eighteen-EN" is not easier to say that the expanded form. Pronouncing the keyboard shorthand does not imply that speaker is savvy or in the know. It should not be done.

After a unfortunate bout of downtime, I'm happy to announce that Sam Hartman has officially revived the Debian-Boston-Social mailing list and our community is back in business.

If you're in Boston and would like to participate in key signings, meetings with local and traveling free software hackers (Debian and otherwise) and to stay keyed into a crowd of people in Boston working on and using Debian and its derivatives, this is your list.

You should feel free to attend events and to plan and announce your own in pubs and other points of interests.

With its strong academic predisposition and its important place in the history of free software, the Boston/Cambridge has no excuse being shown up by places like New York City when it comes to having a happening Debian scene.

You can sign up here.

Mika and I were discussing logistics for our upcoming party and wondering where we would put people if the crowd got too big.

I said something along the lines of, "well if push comes to shove, we can always stick people in the back room." Clearly misunderstanding, Mika's face showed a mixture of confusion and disgust.

We were only able to continue after I made it clear that I my intention was not to isolate and quarantine my friend, Media Lab colleague, and neighbor, Push Singh in our bedroom.

This coming Friday, The Acetarium will host a party to celebrate the beginning of my twenty-fifth year of life.

According to the CDC's live expectancy data for people of my sex, age, and racial demographic, I am projected to live 51.0 years past this coming Friday. In three months, perhaps I should throw a "1/3 of my projected lifespan party."

Details are on The Acetarium website. If you're in Boston and would like to come, please let me know.

Buy Nothing Day is upon us again. As usual, it's being held in the US on Black Friday and elsewhere either on Friday or the day after.

I'm a supporter of BND and try to celebrate each year. Unfortunately, it usually ends up turning into, "buy everything you would buy today the day before day." This arrangement is certainly more convenient for those who like to eat but perhaps not entirely in the spirit of things.

Access and borrowing privileges at Harvard libraries is one perk of being an MIT graduate student. Actually taking advantage of the privileges of course is a borderline Kafka-esque quest that involves 5 forms, several databases, two universities, a rather impressive MIT libraries official stamp, and three geographically separated offices on opposite ends of Cambridge. Only once all those obstacles are triumphantly overcome can one go through the two card swipes and/or manual verifications necessary to get into the Widener stacks.

The webpage makes it sound easy and, in all fairness, nothing about the process is threatening or difficult. While the libraries are worth the effort, it is long and tortuous: by no means for the bureaucratically faint of heart.

The high point of the process, in my opinion, is picking up one's ID from the Harvard ID office. The ID office is appropriately located on the ninth floor of a building that requires ID to enter.

In my computer supported collaborative work seminar, we were discussing the design of table-top systems for synchronous collocated collaboration. There was a bit of conversation on the problems and strategies with images projected onto the table (e.g., people getting in the way of the beam). There seemed to be consensus that most simple and effective solution was projectors mounted directly above the table.

I pointed out that, in this context, straight down was the most straightforward.

Seth Schoen pointed me to this article by Ray Nimmer (not to be confused with the (more) famous copyright scholar David Nimmer). Nimmer₂ is an outspoken advocate of strong copyright and is very skeptical of free software.

What is interesting about this article is the overlap between my argument in Toward a Standard of Freedom and the argument made by Nimmer₂. Nimmer₂'s subject is the free information movement and he argues against a principled position and a social movement toward freedom. He argues that part of Free Software's maturation can be seen in what he sees as the movement's tendency to look beyond its principles and standards. He positively describes a trend of putting aside core values and principles -- both in terms of the particular values in the FSD, OSD and DFSG and in terms of the method of building a movement around a defined standard of freedom -- as, "an assertion of productive and healthy individualism [that] arguably, reflects an expansion of the core ideas of open source outside the narrow confines of its own limiting doctrines."

He holds up Creative Commons as a productive example of how the free information and culture movement is getting beyond their whole doctrine, principles and standards nonsense. If we look at CC as part of a larger free information movement that may eventually start influencing free software, he may be right.

Open Source succeeded in separating the doctrine and definitions of Free Software from its principles and ethical arguments. Creative Commons, and others following their example, has now introduced a broader free information movement that has fully excised any fixed definitions of freedom and openness and has even abandoned the strategy of providing definitions at all.

This of course, is precisely the argument I made in Toward a Standard of Freedom but it's a little disconcerting to see it made by someone on the other side who then comes to the opposite conclusions. As Seth put it, "Nimmer is saying that CC is doing exactly what you're saying it's doing, except that he thinks it's good because he doesn't like free software!"

I think "Cilia" is a pretty name for a girl. My biologist friends disagree. As far as I'm concerned, it sure beats Flagella.

This article from Access North Georgia's Newsroom describes how there is a investigation in Cobb County into allegations that, "the bidding process for the 100 million dollar laptop program was slanted in favor of apple."

Making a laptop for 100 million dollar hardly seems that difficult. Some of us are more ambitious.

If you haven't seen it, the first demo of the laptop was unveiled in Tunis and is totally green. Congratulations to everyone else who put in long days (and nights) on making this demo shine.

Kiko, Micah, and I ate at Legal Seafood's yesterday and had this little message on the bottom of our bill:

PLANNING A REHERSAL DINNER? MAKE YOUR ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE UNIQUE. JOIN US.

Where I come from, rehearsals are things are things that, by definition, happen more than once. When they do happen, it's usually with an a between the e and r.

Of course, I have to respect Legal for so succinctly combining a redundancy and a contradiction on the same topic.