Monthly Archives: May 2006

Google’s Book Search

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Kevin Kelly has a big article on digitizing books in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. He wades into the swamp of intellectual property issues resulting from Google’s Book Search efforts.

He also fleshes out the copyright “orphan” issue, at least 75% of the books in contention in Google’s scanning effort are works that have been pretty much left for dead by the publishing industry: books that are out of print, with unclear copyright status, an unknown rights holder, & are basically unavailable to most readers.

The publishing industry is of course trying to extort money for works that they’ve already abandoned.

There are important decisions happening every day (Net Neutrality, The recent Supreme Court/eBay decision, the EFF’s suit against AT&T) that will impact the digital environment, access to information, privacy, etc. I don’t think we talk/think/debate about them often enough.

Salon’s Peruvian Warrior Mama Helped me steal this title: Have The Culture Wars Jumped the Shark?

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In case you’re not familiar (I wasn’t until very recently), “Jumping the Shark” in TV Land refers to the turning point at which it becomes apparent that a show has stayed too long at the party, and is using irrelevant, outlandish, or just plain stupid gimmicks to keep the audence’s attention… usually to its detriment (The expression came from the episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz jumped over a shark on waterskis)

Anyhow, Anna contends that the increasing number of officials making public statements against contraception (even between married couples) may well be just such a turning point. She says it better than I can:

McCarthy’s witch hunts stopped when he began attacking the Army. In televised hearings that turned the tide of public opinion against him, McCarthy accused Army Attorney General Joseph Welch of employing a man who belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies. Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

***snip***

for a topic traditionally confined to individuals, families, and their doctors,
a move into the sphere of public policy is shocking indeed. I think that
ultimately, this shock will have the effect of moving contraceptive choices back
where they belong — with couples themselves.

I sincerely hope so. I want to believe it.

Another post from Anna resonates here — I have to admit – I’m not a big fan of abortion — I have doubts about it – real ones, that have nothing to do with the sex lives of people i’ve never met(hey what you do is your business) little to do with my religious beliefs(did Jesus even say anything about this? seriously, someone who knows the bible help me out here! Redd?) and a lot to do with knowing very well someone who was born so prematurely his mom was not considered “pregnant enough” to merit a bed in the maternity ward after delivery.

But I also don’t dare presume to elevate my feelings to the status of law for the most personal decison imaginable.

So it seems to me, that

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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First the good news. I was too lazy to run by the store and grab lunch today and thought the cafeteria at work was closed. Growly belly is a sad thing. But YAY- it’s community outreach meeting day so the cafeteria is full of free munchies. I grabbed a bag of chips and a giant muffin and tummy is much happier. There is such a thing as a free lunch after all.

The bad news is that someone spammed the comments. I’ve turned on comment confirmation. I hate it but oh well.

The ugly: thanks to sitemeter I think I know the spammer’s ip address. Anyone know how to kick someone’s ass via their ip? Phuxy- I think you are probably best suited to the task.

The sun is shining

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And I am having a really hard time getting pissed off enough to write anything today. So instead you get random techy music crap.

I finally got my replacement mp3 player (I bought a new one that broke 2 weeks after I got it). To be fair, I think I had a nasty file on my computer because in the space of a month I killed my hard drive and 2 different mp3 players- so I don’t think it was the new player but they were nice enough to replace it anyway.

The big bummer was the 60 gigs of music I lost. Mephistopheles heroically recovered a small part of it and Shakespeare Bill let me hijack his hard drive before he ran away to travel the world (Thanks for the Huey Lewis Bill, it won me some points in the cheesy love song contest) and I am slowly recovering the rest. Lesson learned- back up on external hard drive is now mandatory. The really good news was that i had been better about backing up my photos than i thought, so while I lost my pics from visiting the naughty professor in San Francisco I do still have pictures from Europe. Mephistopheles decided I was officially cool when he saw pictures of me in front of the Max Plank Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany, so I’m glad I recovered them. (I will never have another reason for being at a school for theoretical physics again- really was a fluke that I was there at all).

Since I have the mp3 player I can now return to regularly torturing students with my own music selections instead of just an internet radio station’s playlist. Today it’s Ok Go! Get over it is a fantastic, rocking song. Very happy making. You’re so damn hot is pretty cool to.

I have to say how much I love this little player. The original one I got was pink (no red, unfortunately), but they were out of pink when they sent the replacement. Now I have the silver. It’s cheaper than an Ipod and doesn’t require me to use the evil Itunes. Itunes’ only value to me is as a glorified radio tuner, I really really hate it. This player let’s me use it in hard drive mode so I can just drag and drop files onto it instead of having to make playlists in another program (like windows media player- which I also hate) and then lets me make playlists right on the player. Nice.

Rock on kids. Rock on!