rebel with rather too many causes
Only once in my life have I lost my keys and returned home late at night and found myself in a situation where I needed to climb my apartment building’s back-alley fire escape and "break in" to my own apartment.
Only once in my life has there been a Hollywood movie, complete with cameras, floodlights, and dozens of people, being shot in my building’s back alley.
In an ideal world, they would have fallen on different nights.
The Gates is a massive art installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park, New York City. It’s only going to last for a little over two weeks. As a result, Central Park has been packed. Most of the people packing the park have come with cameras in hand.
Today, Mika and I went to visit central park to see it under some freshly fallen snow. Rather than take pictures of the gates, which everybody does, we decided to (sneakily) take pictures of the people taking pictures of the gates.
We’re calling the resulting photo-documentary Picturesque: Picture of Pictures of the Gates.
There are sometimes jokes in the free and open source software communities about leaders of prominent community organizations needing to be restrained…
This cage was found by — of all people — employees of the Free Software Foundation at — of all places — Linuxworld:
I was speaking to a friend last week and I said managed to mangle a sentence and confuse the words "prostate" (the urinary gland) and "prostrate" (lying down). That little ‘r’ makes a big difference. A little searching on google shows that many other people have made similar error:
I’m not exactly sure what any of these sentences mean but I’m having a fun time imagining.
All of the buildings I’ve lived in (not counting dorms at college), are simply called by their numbers and street name. Swanky buildings have names. Really swanky buildings have names with definite articles like, The Ellington, or The Market Steps. If they’re ultimately swanky, they get to name the street or place where they are located and then call themselves something like One Liberty Plaza — with "One" written out.
My friend Lizard lives in what appears to be a great building. You can tell because it’s called The Centennial. I was thinking it would be a great place to live until I, like everyone who entered or exited the building that weekend, saw this in the building’s entrance:
Cruel.
Even with a definite article, I would never want to live in a building with managers who tempt and torture their tenants like this.
Yesterday, I bought a book called "Animal Weapons" by Philip Street at the Strand.
I used it to kill a cockroach.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a extremely interesting talk by Niva Elkin-Koren on the limits of private ordering (i.e., contracts and licenses) in building communities around the production of free (for definition of free) creative works. She’s writing a paper which I hope to get my hands on very soon. I have every reason to believe it will be excellent.
Elkin-Koren is a law professor and one of things she did in her talk was argue that Creative Commons in particular, but also Free Software and Free Software inspired licensing in general, is using licenses and contract law (private ordering in legal jargon) in such a way that helps opens the door to all kinds of less well-intentioned uses that advocates of freedom might not be as comfortable with. If I can say, "you can give away my music but you can’t use it for commercial use," or, "you can use my software unless you violate someone’s human rights as defined by the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights", what’s to keep Adobe from saying that I can’t implement a workaround for their eBooks or keeping the DVD-CCA from saying I can’t watch a DVD without a licensed CSS or reverse engineer the protocal?
I don’t think people should be able to able to use contracts and licenses to say anything because I don’t think it is in the best interests of creating the most free works and I think Elkin-Koren agrees. I think that fiddling around or reverse engineering a piece of software should be a right that no license has any business blocking. It’s outside of the scope of what I think copyright licenses should be able to be used for.
However, as long as we live in a world where people are producing non-free creative works and believe that they have something to gain by restricting consumers’ rights, we need to face the fact that if we are using contracts in the Creative Commons or Free Software contexts to place any and all restrictions we think are in the interest of freedom, we may be opening the door to abuse.
We all know that copyleft is enabled through copyright. As a result, there is a tendency for software freedom advocates to argue for stronger copyleft by, explicitly or implicitly (and often unintentionally), arguing for stronger copyright. This is wrong. I don’t believe in peace through war and I don’t believe in free access to information through stronger copyright — as a stategic technique or as a ethically defensible strategy.
Using copyright, as it stands, as a weapon against itself is strategic position that I believe is justifiable. However we must resist the temptation to adopt an expansionist position on copyright when we think it benefits freedom because the advocates of freedom will lose more than they gain.
Elkin-Koren’s argument poses an important — and open — question to the supporters of free information in asking them to consider the extent to which their free licensing practices opens the door to an environment where private ordering allows anyone to do anything.
At the talk, SPI’s lawyer (and sometimes director of photography) Greg Pomerantz made the argument in support of Free Software licensing saying that Free Software licenses are limited in scope to cover those things that are already copyright rights. I think this is a clever way to critique the policy of license proliferation by Creative Commons and others.
In addition to arguments about the lack of freedom in some creative commons licenses, they may be strategic arguments to make that by pursuing software and content licenses that expand beyond the reach of copyright’s existing realm, advocates of freedom are doing more harm that good — that licenses should focus on things within the realm of copyright (derivative works, distribution, etc) and not things like outside like how they will be used (e.g., barring non-commercial use).
This happens to integrate quite well with more fundamental critique of Creative Commons that I have written but I’ll save that for another day.
Today, I removed the word "tetrinet" from the list of highlighted words in my IRC client.
It’s the end of a (slightly less productive) era.
Many people are worried about the nasty privacy implications — realized and potential — of supermarket and chain store "loyalty" cards. As RFID chips are introduced, things get even more scary.
In an attempt to attack supermarkets’ data-mining operation and to gain a new shopping identity in the process, many people have taken to swapping cards with each other. Over the last few years, I’ve been among these people.
A couple years ago, a few friends and I came up with the idea of creating a sort of online loyalty card swap-meet where people could come and exchange their supermarket or chain-store loyalty cards with total strangers from the privacy of their own homes. Some other people have arranged to swap numbers for particular stores but our idea was to swap the actual cards from any store that uses a card. We actually built most of it but got hung up at the last minute on a couple of details and with writing some of the explanatory text.
Last night, I made the final push and finished the code and set everything up and seeded the database with the lists of as many supermarkets that I know use loyalty cards as listed on CASPIAN’s supermarket list.
If you’ve got an extra card (and maybe if you don’t), go ahead and sign up to swap! This is one of those things that works better when more people do it so tell your friends and spread the word.
Information and the card-swapping apparatus is all online at: http://cardexchange.org
I usually only shower ever day or two unless I am sweaty, dirty, or smell bad. This seems very sensible to me.
Several days ago, under criticism by Mika, I defended this behavior by arguing that the fall of the Roman Empire was brought on by the fact that Romans took too many baths. Now many people argue that Roman decadence, of which Roman baths are a major example, was a leading cause of the fall but I used the term "bath" quite literally.
I argued that the Romans were overzealous bathers and we’d be wise to learn from them if I intend to avoid their fate.
The truth aside, I thought this was an excellent argument.
Normally, I do not publicly make fun of my girlfriend or mother.
It is only with that disclaimer that I present pictures of myself wearing this hat designed by my girlfriend and knit by mother. I’m not sure which one to thank for this bold fashion statement.
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…maybe the punk-rock muppet toupee look is popular in Europe.
I once met someone who thought that Chlamydia would be a pretty name for a baby girl.
A few years ago, I bought what I thought was a tea strainer from a Chinese restaurant supply store. Yesterday, I saw a similar tea strainer being used to filter cigarette butts and other solids in a urinal in a Chinese restaurant.
I’m slightly worried about this. Either this restaurant has repurposed a tea strainer as a urinal filter or I have repurposed a urinal filter as a tea strainer.
Sorry for the papal double-header but I’ve read a number of interesting things in articles on the pope recently. One was this comment:
Popes cannot delegate some things, including their ability to pronounce with infallibility on matters of doctrine.
Imagine if popes could delegate infallibility.
I don’t think I’d want this for two reasons. First, I learn a lot from my mistakes. Being wrong is an important part of human growth and think the less infallible people we have, the better.
Second (and excuse the Disney reference), it reminds me a little bit of the trap that Jafar fell into at the end of Aladdin when he tried extend his ultimate power by gaining the ability to delegate that power. He ended up stuck in a lamp. I don’t wish that on anybody.
I noticed a series of articles (here’s one example) about the ailing pope that were all based off a single AP article. I know because they all used this phrase:
With the pope hospitalized, most of the Vatican’s day-to-day operation are handled by the Curia: a well-oiled bureaucracy with centuries old roots.
Each time I read this, I reflected on the fact that they are not only well-oiled in the sense that their operation runs smoothly and without metaphorical friction, but also because they are all high ranking church officials who have doubtlessly been anointed several times and are, quite literally, well-oiled.