Via Lippard, Bruce Schneier points out this video of people having fun with the Virginia DMV:
December 2006
Sage advice from Brooke. I’m not going to name names, but I find it particularly disturbing when people who work in tech policy refer to individual blog posts as “blogs.” The blog is the medium, not the message; calling a post a “blog” is the equivalent of calling an article in the Washington Post a [...]
Related to my previous post, I think it’s no coincidence that the Samba team has taken the lead in criticizing the Microsoft-Novell deal. Some commentators have argued that the free software movement objects to the deal because they want to prevent interoperability between free and proprietary software, thereby forcing vendors to choose sides. But that [...]
Another bit of fallout from Novell’s patent agreement with Microsoft, as Samba developer Jeremy Allison quits Novell. He was quickly snapped up by Google. I’ve never heard of the guy, but Ars calls him “prominent,” and Groklaw calls him “legendary.” His letter said, in part: As many of you will guess, this is due to [...]
I’d like to call out an interesting development from the past week that is a great example of how the Internet can do an end run around traditional regulation–in this case, federal broadcast indecency rules. As described very well in this NY Times article in yesterday’s Arts section, Saturday Night Live had a decently funny [...]
Over at Catallarchy, Sean Lynch has a tirade against Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an excellent example of when crowds are not wise; one’s actual knowledge has no correlation whatsoever with how much effort they’re willing to put out to keep Wikipedia accurate, and some of my recent experience there seems to indicate exactly the opposite, that [...]
Hoping to discover Universal Truths, I have been reading Law in Imperial China and The Law of Primitive Man among other things. One never knows when one might stumble across the Law of Nature. But it’s all downhill after Hobbes and Locke. History is quite determined to make a mockery of it all. (This ultimately [...]
The FCC got a wake-up call yesterday in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City. The agency was there in court defending its recent actions in various indecency enforcement cases against Fox Television. Specifically, the question at hand was whether of not the use of a fleeting explicative should be categorically barred [...]
Related to my last post, it occurs to me that there are a lot of businesses that drink from one fire hose or another, and then sell the resulting expertise to people who are too busy to drink from the fire hose themselves. Free software firms and college professors are two such examples. It occurs [...]
David Robinson, managing editor of The American, has a great article arguing that soaring spending on higher education is something to celebrate: Modern academics often liken their work to drinking from a fire hose. Historians, philosophers, and physicists all find it impossible to keep up with every potentially relevant paper or study. It’s not just [...]
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