NPR ran a Show [You\’ll need Real Player to listen] on this mess.
Wired has Copyright Clash Shutters Speech a nice overview, and DVD Piracy Judges Resolute a look at the hearings held yesterday in NYC.
This is the first case to test the DMCA.
Slashdot also has a Report From The 2600 Appeal Hearing, a very thorough and complete look at the hearings.
Stories from The NYTimes, and The USA Today
Politics
In observance of May Day …
Brian writes \”The Chicago Tribune has a Good Feature on \”the world\’s oldest socialist publisher,\” the 115-year-old Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co.
\”
The Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. is 115 years old, the world\’s oldest socialist publisher, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont are now in charge.
ACLU Ads Warn Of ‘Massive’ Government Cyber-Snooping
\”We are clearly trying to raise public awareness about the extent of the government\’s capacity for (electronic) eavesdropping,\” says ACLU Associate Director Barry Steinhardt. \”We\’re trying to focus the attention of the (Bush) administration and the Republican leadership.\” [more…] from NewsBytes.
Worthless Study Proves Nothing
I post this one, more to comment on the story, not to report any findings.
This Story was picked up and reported on by about everyone.
A preliminary study of 150 people aged 20 to 35 has shown that more than one in 10 are suffering from severe problems with their memory.
Tiny study, actually, not even a study, a preliminary study, shows some people are stupid, and all of a sudden this is the headline I read…
\”Computer-mad generation has a memory crash\”
There are so many things wrong with this story I will not waste my time with it.
Please read the entire story critically, and make up your own mind.
Dubya Exits the Information Superhighway
This Story from Capitolhillblue
says President Bush has now \”exited the information
superhighway\” avoid having his e-mail become public,
something I\’m sure BIll Gates, and Bill Clinton wish
they would\’ve done.
\”Now that presidential e-mail is subject to
open records, it\’s going to be a phone-call
relationship,\” Bush said.
The President who reads, succeeds?
Interested in how history will remember the presidency of voracious reader Bill Clinton, Harold Evans ponders the question \”Does history suggest any correlation between a passion for serious reading and an ability to inspire and manage the nation?\” in this article from the New York Times.
Compiling a list of bibliophile presidents from biographies and histories, he compares them with presidential rankings from a 1994 Siena Research Institute tracking survey and the 1999 C-Span Survey of Presidential Leadership
Not surprisingly, the bibliophiles ranked higher overall.
Public Forum on Warranty Protection
The UCITA Saga continues.
The Federal Trade Commission will hold a public forum on October 26 and 27, 2000 to examine warranty protection for software and other high-tech goods and services marketed to consumers.
The public forum will be held at the Federal Trade Commission headquarters, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. on October 26, 2000 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and on October 27, 2000 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
You can also see FTC staff comments to NCCUSL during the date
preceeding NCCUSL\’s approval of UCITA, the first on October
30, 1998, and the second on July 9, 1999.
Bill Says send Meds, not Windows
Wired has a Story on the Digital Dividends conference. A gaggle of important rich geeks and bankers got together to talk about using information technologies to spur development and create markets among the world\’s poor [Read: How to make money off the 3rd world]. It took Bill Gates to set them straight. He says to fix problems of disease and literacy first, then maybe worry about computers later.
\”The percent of growth that an IT firm like Hewlett-Packard will get from people who make less than a dollar a day is minimal,\” Gates said. \”Do people have any concept of what it means to live on less than a dollar a day? There\’s no electricity. Do they have PCs that don\’t use electricity?\”
Feds Elated With E-Rate
Wired has a Story on 2 new reports that say many good things about the E-Rate here in the US. : E-Rate and the Digital Divide: A Preliminary Analysis From the Integrated Studies of Educational Technology, conducted by the Urban Institute. The report found that e-rate funding is accomplishing what it was established to do, namely improving internal connections in the nation\’s poorer schools and getting them connected to the Internet.
\”The e-rate is helping to eliminate the digital divide and raise standards of learning in virtually every school and classroom,\” Riley said at the Conference on Educational Technology. \”The report clearly shows that we\’re moving in the right direction.\”
A second study released Monday from the National Center for Education Statistics, Teachers\’ Tools for the 21st Century: A Report on Teachers\’ Use of Technology showed that 99 percent of teachers have access to computers or the Internet at school, but not all of them have the skills to use it effectively.
Murdock’s Lies and the Representation of Information
Murdock\’s Lies and the Representation of Information, by Australian professor Gordon Fletcher, takes a critical, postmodern view of the recent question, \”What is Information?\” Information Theory has encouraged us to look at information as something uniform, but this distracts us from what is actually represented by it. This paper looks at examples of information as artefacts, from a material culture perspective, and as stories, all with the point of providing insight into the social nature of what now circulates electronically in commodified form.
Go ahead for an excerpt from the conclusion:
Murdock\’s Lies and the Representation of Information, by Australian professor Gordon Fletcher, takes a critical, postmodern view of the recent question, \”What is Information?\” Information Theory has encouraged us to look at information as something uniform, but this distracts us from what is actually represented by it. This paper looks at examples of information as artefacts, from a material culture perspective, and as stories, all with the point of providing insight into the social nature of what now circulates electronically in commodified form.
Go ahead for an excerpt from the conclusion:Information is never trivial, it is not \’just\’ lumps of binary or analogue data. Information is always social. As with all stories and artefacts, what information reveals about human practice and experience extends beyond the immediate surfaces of function and form. Understanding information, however, is a path negotiated between the philosophy of an essential informational \’element\’ and the discovery of utter specificity in its contextualised experience. There is no pure information. What is present is the intersection of practices, contexts, proxemics and provenance. In some situations, however, and with the right story, these intersection can assume the illusion of an objective state.
Recent Comments