Archive | June 3, 2003

The Power of the Web

Had a humbling reminder today. I was looking for a little utility, PFE32, a “Professional File Editor,” highly recommended if you’re swapping files from Unix to PC, because of it’s automatic CR – to – CRLF translations. I knew it was somewhere on my hard drive, since I had copied backups of my last two machines (2 Gb and 6 GB, respectively) onto it. But Microsoft search was taking forever to plow through even the small subset of folders where I suspected it to be. Google to the rescue! “PFE32” and I was pointing to the web site, clicked through some links to a local download site, and I had the 700+ kb file unzipped before Search had finished, even though I’m dialed up on a pitiful 26.4 kbps connection. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Maybe I should get my stuff better organized. Maybe I should enable Indexing Services on my local machine.

Petition for a return of the Public Domain – Please Sign!

Do you have one minute to web-surf for the Public Domain?. Larry Lessig needs your help to preserve the Public Domain:



“We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain. This proposal has received a great deal of support. It is now facing some important lobbyists’ opposition. We need a public way to begin to demonstrate who the lobbyists don’t speak for. This is the first step. If you are an ally in at least this cause, please sign the petition. Please blog it, please email it, please spam it, please buy billboards about it — please do whatever you can. And most importantly, please help us explain its importance. There is a chance to do something significant here. But it will take a clearer, simpler voice than mine.”


Click here to sign the petition.  It takes less than a minute to sign.  Thanks.

[Ernie the Attorney]

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.