Just another nerd.
Back on December 17th, I sent Seth Dillingham a letter via USPS Priority Mail. Because of the Christmas holiday, I sort of understood why he hadn’t received it before Christmas, but when the New Year came and it still hadn’t arrived that was very annoying.
Not to worry, though — it finally arrived on January 21st. I guess I misunderstood the lady at the Post Office. I thought I was paying for 2-3 day delivery, but they thought I wanted 20-30 day delivery.
This past week has been absolute hell. First, I’ve got a number of important, deadline-driven projects that I’m trying to finish at work. So it was inevitable that the entire family would come down with a flu-like virus. I can handle that — I’m used to working through feeling like crap and getting things done anyway (I have extremely talented people who work for and with me).
But then my daughter had to go and contract some sort of viral infection in her eye and then pass that little gift along to me. Ugh. I can work through a lot, but it’s a bit hard to get work done when I’m sitting at my desk and my eyes are involuntarily crying like a baby.
Thankfully, the eye virus seems to have finally left my system, though the rest of me still feels like crap.
Cory Doctorow posted last week about a bizarre encounter with American Airlines in which an AA attendant tried to convince him that a Transportation Security Agency regulation required him to write out a list of the names and addresses of everyone he planned to stay with while in the United States (if I remember correctly, Doctorow is a Canadian national who has recently been working in the UK for the Electronic Frontier Foundation).
Then this guy writes a letter to AA to see if this is true and gets the following response from AA spokesman Tim Wagner,
That said, our contracted screener veered from standard procedure when she asked for Mr. Doctorow to write the addresses of his destinations in the United States. She did clearly state that once the interview was completed, the address list would be destroyed in front of Mr. Doctorow or that he could have the list to keep. American Airlines absolutely does not register or record that type of personal data.
Although the agent concerned is very promising, this incident clearly showed a lack of experience in the questioning process. The agent will go through additional training and supervision. Through daily briefings, the remainder of the station will benefit from the experience gained from this incident.
Doctorow replies that,
At no time did the screener or her supervisor ever state that the list would be destroyed in front of me, nor that I could keep the list. In fact, all three AA security people I dealt with — the screener, her supervisor and the terminal manager — told me that they didn’t know what would be done with the list after the interview, that they had no idea what AA’s document-retention and data-privacy policies were
The AA response doesn’t pass the smell test. What would be the point of asking a passenger to write out the names and addresses of who Doctorow is staying with in order to simply destroy that list in front of him?
Source:
Cory Doctorow and Secondary ‘Secondary Screening’ Classes. SecondaryScreening.Net, January 21, 2005.
Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends? Cory Doctorow, Boing! Boing!, January 19, 2005.
InfoWeek reports that Hitachi plans to begin sampling a 5″, 200gb holographic disk in 2005 and incorporate the technology into drive system in 2006. According to Infoweek, Hitachi hopes to increase capacity to 400gb in 2007.
Tom’s Hardware has more technical details about InPhase, the holographic disk company that Hitachi acquired and which will actually be producing holographic drives for the company. According to Tom’s Hardware,
The prototype drive records data into InPhase’s patented two-chemistry photopolymer WORM material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic disk substrates, the company said. The prototype can arrange more than one million bits of data into a single page, which is recorded with a single flash of a 407 nm laser beam, according to InPhase. Multiple pages of data, referred to as a book, are recorded in one spot on the disk providing approximately 12 MByte of data in a single book location.
The holographic disk will apparently be available eventually in sizes up to 1.6 TB.
Creative Commons has released the 1.0 version of its ccPublisher app which makes it easy for users to tag files with CC licenses and upload the files to the Internet Archive.
NC Soft, makers of MMORPG ‘City of Heroes’, has filed a motion to dismiss Marvel’s lawsuit claiming the game is one big copyright/trademark violation factory, since the game’s character creation system allows players to create characters similar to Marvel (or DC or any other superhero property) characters.
NC Soft’s motion, among other things, argues that,
Kids with wandering imaginations have long decorates school notebooks with pictures of fantastic and supernatural beings of their own design. The ingenuity of individuals, as expressed through the creation of characters incorporating timeless themes of mythology, patriotism, “good,” and “evil,” has been a source of entertainment in the form of role-playing games for ages. In the face of technology that enables individuals to engage in such activities in a virtual, on-line context, Marvel Enterprises, Inc. and Marvel characters, Inc. (collectively, “Marvel”) have taken the unprecedented step of attempting to appropriate for themselves the world of fantasy-based characters, based upon alleged rights in works purportedly embodied in four comic books.
. . .
City of Heroes is a tool that encourages originality, not slavish copying. It allows young and old to exercise their imaginations to create super-powered beings and send them off to interact with the creations of other individuals in a virtual world called Paragon City. If it should be banned, then so should the #2 pencil, the Lego block, modeling clay, and anything else that allows one to give form to ideas. In Marvel’s view of the world, if people should play online games with super heroes, they must only play with licensed Marvel characters, and imagination shall be damned. Marvel’s attempt to monopolize online “hero” games and quash creativity has no basis, and its complaint should be dismissed.
Source:
NC Soft Files Motion to Dismiss Marvel Suit. Newsarama.Com, Undated.