He’s still wrong about Microsoft, but Lawrence Lessig has a brilliant idea with his Creative Commons initiative (there’s not much at the web site now, but supposedly it will launch in a few months). The idea is simple — offer intellectual property licenses that are a) relatively airtight and b) allow people to customize the…
February, 2002
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The BBC has fascinating account of the role of the humble barcode in human progress. The barcode made its debut 25 years ago in Great Britain — just a year after the first bar code appeared in the United States. The barcode is ubiquitous today and, as the BBC documents, has revolutionized retail stores. For…
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Writing in National Review Online, Deroy Murdock slammed the Bush administration this week for its odd law enforcement priorities which seems to involve focusing on marijuana users rather than terrorists. Murdock notes that the FBI warned a couple weeks ago of possible terrorist attacks occurring on or around Feb. 12. So did the FBI beef…
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Last week the House of Representatives passed the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill which is probably doomed to die in the Senate (which is a good thing). In a very confusing article, CNSNews.Com quoted Ralph Nader to the effect that he opposes Shays-Meehan, but is this accurate? Quoting from the CNSNews.Com article, Former Green Party…
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Mauritius — an Indian Ocean island-nation of 1.3 million — has had a real problem lately finding someone willing to stay on as its figurehead president. Mauritius is a parliamentary democracy that, like a number of such political systems, has a president whose job is largely ceremonial. The president of Mauritius has only two options…
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Donald Rumsfeld should be fired for simply publicly proposing that the United States might plant false stories in foreign media in order to shape public opinion. The United States already has a credibility problem in much of the Arab world — witness the editorials in that part of the world blaming Israel for the 9/11…
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Via Daniel Pink’s Just One Thing weblog, comes word that the U.S. Census Bureau has posted The Population Profile of the United States: 2000 in PDF format.
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One of the more ludicrous examples of a study being used as part of a scare campaign were reports last week of a new study that found sleeping 8 to 10 hours each night increases the risk of dying. Unfortunately, not only was this study poorly designed but its results weren’t all that impressive. Researcher…
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Yikes. Avantgo is about to create massive breakage in its custom channels. According to Tom’s Hardware reports that businesses — including several large companies — were uusing the custom channels for enterprise use rather than paying upwards of $10,000 for the dedicated server that Avantgo wanted to sell them. Avantgo’s solution — any custom channel…
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I guess I’m just too much of a law-and-order right winger. This story is even more disgusting than the teenagers who terrorized the family. A man in Great Britain lost his temper with a 22 month old girl he was babysitting because she had an accident while being potty trained. So, of course, he turned…