antikoan

 |::| Sunday, April 21, 2002

 |::| "Sell me a book, but it's got to be impossible for anyone to read it but me."  9:44:22 PM 

"If all I do is point someone to a location on the web, then what have I done that triggers the copyright laws? I haven't made a 'copy' of anything." |::| [Ernie the Attorney on Scripting News]

He misses the point, albeit perhaps on purpose. The point is that the work is being used in a way that's "unintended."

The real counterargument to that, I think, is that it was quite silly of the plaintiffs to intend a use that didn't account for deep-linking. If they wanted to avoid deep-linking, they should have constructed a system that prevented it. It would be almost childishly simple to accomplish; in fact, it might even be easier than having persistent links.

 |::| Just because them what wins gets to write history...  9:11:14 PM 

... doesn't mean they made it.

Bush's bloopers disappearing from transcripts / White House record excises mistakes, hecklers, false starts. [Daypop Top News Stories]

This bit sticks out for me:

The most public allegation of transcript sanitizing was last September, when White House press secretary Ari Fleischer warned that Americans "need to watch what they say." The phrase did not at first appear in the White House transcript.

I'm guessing that Ari Fleischer got picked on a lot when he was a kid. And I'm betting he dealt with it by becoming somebody's henchman. "You guys better watch what you say about my friend Jimbo..."

 |::| Picking Your Feet In Poughkeepsie  6:24:33 PM 

SJ Mercury: Want privacy? Take action. Dan Gillmor. That was among the key themes at the 12th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, held last week in San Francisco. As corporate and political interests plan and build the architecture of the emerging networks, they are tending to leave out what should be core components. [Tomalak's Realm]

Gillmor, as usual (though increasingly) formulates the issue more clearly than we seem to be able to find it in other areas of public discourse:

The "fair use" doctrine is about public rights to use copyrighted materials in ways the owners might not approve. We, the people, have limited but enormously important rights to make personal copies, quote short passages and resell books, among other things.

But the companies designing DRM schemes are effectively asserting the right to thwart fair use. Is it possible to build it in at the beginning, or are we facing a future where owners insist on controls that limit fair use and teenage hackers break through such schemes? The evidence to date tells me that we're moving all too quickly toward the latter sort of regime.

And that latter scheme would suit the large content-owners just fine, thank you.

They wouldn't admit it, of course. They have to maintain a fiction of caring whether their technology is good, but what really matters to them is that it's good enough to form a plausible basis for prosecution. As ever, what ends up being important is that the interest with the power (Gillmor's "moneyed interests", here the large content-controlling entities like News Corp, Knight Ridder, Gannett, AOL Time Warner, Disney, Sony, etc.) have a legal (and hence "moral") right to shut down activity that they don't like, whenever they decide they don't like something.

 |::|   5:09:52 PM 

Interesting....

Woot! Lots of action on the whole thrash on Instant Outlining, Jabber, and scalability. I copped a public flame from Dave in response to my reply to Doug's original post on Radio-Dev. I replied on the list with regard to the technical bits, and Dave has already responded before I've finished my out-of-band response to his comments on respect. I've replied; we'll see how we do.

Aah. Dave, you're absolutely right, let's deal with the technical issues.

[Garth Kidd: Deadly Bloody Serious about Radio UserLand]

 |::|   5:02:35 PM 

Recently Updated Instant Outlines. Just in case I forget where it is again, here's a link to the list of recently updated instant outlines. [Garth Kidd: Deadly Bloody Serious about Radio UserLand]

 |::|   4:59:30 PM 

My browser can deal with lots of windows at a time, but that doesn't necessarily imply that my brain can deal with all those tabs, so I regularly have to empty them out. Posting quick items to my various blogs is an excellent way of doing that, but posting to Radio is dog slow at the moment, even when I manually sleep whichever anonymous background thread is causing it to chew 100% of my CPU.

So, I've quickly scanned around for a Python based utility to use to post about Python to my Radio-maintained blog, and it looks like the radioclient sample shipped with PythonCard will do the job nicely. PythonCard requires wxPython, and PyCrust also looks handy. It's installation day!

[Garth Kidd: Deadly Bloody Serious about Radio UserLand]

This could be useful. Need to take a look at it. Though I'm leaning more and more toward building something based on the Moveable Type libraries.

 |::| Drupal (yet another server-based CMS)  2:32:10 PM 

Uses PHP, supports at least some XML options. Compare to Moveable Type (http://moveabletype.org/) and PHP-Nuke.

 |::| The Little Engine That Thought It Thought, part 020421  1:00:36 PM 

"I started to feel like I was interacting with something with a mind. Of course Google doesn't have one, but it does a fantastic job of tapping into our collective minds. In a sense Google is a global intellect, and I'm happy to report that the world has a good mind." |::|DaveNet: The Mind of Google. [Scripting News]

That is just some of the sloppiest thinking I've ever seen from a smart person. I haven't seen anything that intellectually disappointing since Machines Who Think. Google no more "taps into our collective minds" than cold readers are clairevoyant.

 |::| Sunday Morning Madness  12:37:25 PM 

Just some fun stuff I don't want to lose track of...

What kind of terrorist are you?

A fun and entertaining way to figure out your personality-based preference for High Yield Killing Method. I'm a... um, serial killer. Great. Charming, positively charming...

Quiz: http://ara11.org/quiz1.html
From: http://www.wildlink.com/freelink/index.sht
Still more "What X are you?" quizzes @: Quiz Blog

The Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs Wants You!

"The Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs' mission is to enhance the quality of life, promote economic and ecological opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of Sasquatch, Sasquatch culture and Cascadian native hominoids. We will accomplish this through the delivery of quality services, maintaining government-to-Sasquatch relationships within the spirit of Sasquatch self-determination."

Well, at least it's good to know that someone is working to minimize the digital divide between hominoids and humans.

Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs: http://www.zapatopi.net/bsa.html
Republic of Cascadia: http://www.zapatopi.net/cascadia.html

Yes, that's right: Steve Jobs really is the Antichrist.

"Dr." Richard Paley, a teacher of "Theobiology" at Fellowship University, has published a penetrating, brilliant semiotic exegesis that exposes the way in which "evolutionism" is being propagandized in modern America. Shockingly enough, one of the greatest offenders -- and, one suspects, one of the root conspirators -- is Apple Computers.

However, these propagandists aren't just targeting the young. Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.

But is this really such a shock? Lets look for a moment at Apple Computers. Founded by long haired hippies, this company has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values". But there are even darker undertones to this company than most are aware of. Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness.

But wait, there's more!

ADDENDUM III (4/20/2002): Another reader (it has been busy today!) has informed me of another link between Apple and the forces of darkness that my initial research missed. Apparently the Darwin OS is not the original creation of Apple Computers but is instead based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork (pictured above). This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.

If only those pagans had paid attention in Sunday school. Then they wouldn't be such bad spellers. (Since, as we all well know, poor spelling is a sign of Godlessness -- after all, proper English-language spelling is ordained by God, after all.)

ADDENDUM IV (4/21/2002): Apparently anti-Christian zealots -- as well as shocked Christians who have unwittingly become Mac owners -- are linking to this article, which explains the large number of emails we have received on this topic. More clues have come in showing the dark nature of Apple Computers. According to one of our readers, the new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

And if all them pesky Computer Elites had just kept to their bibles instead of "thinking different", then the good reverend wouldn't have to risk his soul deploying the tools of satan (which computers must be, after all) to fight satan's minions.

Note: The larger purpose of the site is to achieve certain "objectives", such as the shutdown of that awful, awful, disrespectful -- nay, downright sacrelicious (and not incidentally really, really funny) -- website for the "Landover Baptist Church." The really most amazing thing about all of this is that these people appear to be serious...

At: http://members.truepath.com/objective/propaganda.html (does anybody else find it ironic that a hard-line Christian site would advertise life-insurance? after all, doesn't God take care of everything?)
From: http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/2002/04/21.html#a4954 [mostly in German]
... And to him, from: http://www.textlab.de/news/ [in German]

 |::|   11:36:32 AM 

Color-Blindness Check

IE only, as far as I can see. Comes as a web page and a bookmarklet [IE only]. Adjusts the colors for a page to simulate red-green colorblindness. The effect is delayed by a few seconds, but it seemed to work for every page I tried.

Referer: http://w3future.com/weblog/2002/03/11.html [links to an explanation of the JavaScript, as well as technical background on the user-access issue]
Source: http://www.q42.nl/demos/colorblindnesssimulator/