2. May, 2004 - free culture
- Lawrence Lessig is Practicing the Liberty He Preaches, by making his new book available online with a Creative Commons license. So far it doesn’t seem to be hurting sales, which matches my experience with Mead Made Easy. In my case, I think having the online version available actually made for more sales, since I could get the book in front of people who’d never heard of me. I think about going to the effort of doing another printing every once in a while, but it’s an awful lot of work and while I was happy with the sales, the fact that I’ve self-published it once makes it nearly impossible to find a “real” publisher. A less favorable review of the book is in the May 3 issue of National Review [subscription required] by James V. DeLong. DeLong pans the book, calling it
thin gruel
and calls the Free Culture Movment childish. Lessig and DeLong debated back in March. If you’ve got some time (about an hour and a half), I recommend watching the archive. Both Lessig and DeLong explain their points of view pretty well, and they’re actually pretty close in their positions. [nyt]
- Bruce Schneier talks of Terrorist Threats and Political Gains made by the Republicans who seem to be benefiting from having the Department of Homeland Security scaring people with threats of terrorism. I tend to side with Schneier here, in that I think there are a lot of things that DHS is doing that don’t provide any additional security, like the fact that the airlines handed over millions of passenger records just after 9/11. But the bigger problem is that in that case at least, once the FBI had the records, they can’t even destroy them once they’d done the initial analysis on them because the records might be asked for in discovery on a future case.
- The Secretary of State of California Bans E-Vote Machines, and is
passing along evidence to the state’s attorney general to bring criminal and civil charges against voting-machine-maker Diebold Election Systems for fraud.
Good for him! Also, for this November’s election, all counties using any touch-screen machines that have been recertified by then will have to provide a paper ballot for any voter asking for one. [wired]
- Here’s a Silent Solution to the noise coming from your computer. I’m thinking that I’m going to be buying a new G5 sometime this summer, and I expect that I’ll be happy with Apple’s work on silencing them, but if I want the computer to be even quieter, some of the tricks from this article may prove useful. [slashdot]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 02 May 2004 09:30:19.