Archive | September 13, 2003

Way cool. I remember the original Arthur C. Clarke story, “Fountains of
Paradise,” and he’s quoted in the article as saying that he expected to
be ridiculed, and then he expected it to be built. I suspect there’s a
lot more technological problems to be solved, but this will be cool.
Space Elevator Going Up [Slashdot]
I have maintained for years that mankind must get off planet, if only
to avoid the “single point of failure” problem. Our little blue marble
of Earth is a tiny speck in the vast and dangerous universe…

Robert X. Cringely, a favorite columnist, writes at PBS
about the dangers of identity theft. The danger has always been
present, but computerization is making mass theft a larger threat.
Reaction at Slashdot to “Cringely on Identity Theft [Slashdot]” is pretty good, overall, although I always recommend a threshold of 4 or above to make reading manageable.

EFF Petition.
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a petition for those of us
appalled by the RIAA’s singleminded attempt to criminalize file sharing
rather than working to come up with workable ways to achive the
multiple aims of building a flourishing a public domain, providing
access to works no longer available thorugh publishers, and
compensating artists….” [Joho the Blog]

Ideasas Property – the Big Lie of Big Content is
the title for this piece criticising the idea that ideas are property
that can be controlled like physical property. In the US, the framers
of the Constitution found the idea so important that they included it
in the document: Section 8:

Seems pretty straight-forward to me.