Dan Gillmor makes the point that we have to keep hammering home: Creators of creative works do not own their works the way land owners own their land. The US Constitution gives authors some rights that land owners have but carefully circumscribes them: creators have a monopoly on the right to publish their works for a limited time (originally 14 years, now life + 70) and within a limited domain (Fair Use).

Is this unfair to creators? Nope, and not just because creating a public domain is a greater good to which the creator must bow. Creators do this funny thing of publishing their works. In making their works public those works cease to be fully private the way land can be. You can’t both make it public and demand that the public not use what they’ve bought. Some leeway is required. Copyright law tries to preserve that leeway, despite the Big Lie of Big Content.

And with digital rights management — or what Dan more accurately calls “digital restrictions management” — on the way, the owners of copyrights will be able to control with near perfect precision how you use what you’ve bought. Thus, the noble compromise that is copyright will be torn up, leaving the public as trespassers in what used to be the public domain.

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Our daughter just selected her courses for her first year at college. Among the four: Existentialism. Which has me a little scared.

Existentialism did a good job on me in my freshman year of convincing me that life is meaningless. I moped. Ordinary objects lost their significance even as I gazed at them. I looked around for a local Seine to plunge into. It took several more years for me to figure out why I think existentialism is wrong: the sort of meaning it laments hasn’t been with us since God died, but other (lesser) meaning has always been with us. It’s like me saying I’m unloved because Uma Thurman hasn’t fallen for me, while ignoring that Ann Geller has. Well, maybe it’s a little like that. [Note: I’m Ann’s husband.]

I’d been thinking about exisentialism anyway — and why I like it — because of the conversation the Happy Tutor and AKMA had last week. Akma began by being offended by Bush’s bald-faced lying. The Happy Tutor wondered how a post-Modernist can distinguish truth and lie, and then reflected further. Akma, disdaining the pomo label, replied. Wonderful stuff.

As the Tutor notes, his words may sound like a personal attack on Akma, but they do not indicate any lack of respect. Truly. Tutor’s question is: How can a deconstructionist hold moral truths? Hasn’t post-modernism pulled its own ground out from underneath it?

Is there a harder question? In this newly connected world we’re more aware than ever that other cultures hold beliefs contrary to ours but with as much conviction. Even after we weed out the cultures that we count as crazy or evil (and that weeding out is, of course, fraught with its own problems), we’re left with “legitimate” ideas that others hold and we reject. So, do we let ourselves be paralyzed into inaction? Do we take absolute actions — like killing people in war — as if our beliefs had absolute foundation? Isn’t this the story of the past century? Isn’t it what western culture has been building to for two millennia?

And in this situation, existentialism offers an answer that is unsatisfactory but is at least self-aware. Sartre knew that he held his beliefs and values largely because of the historical situation into which he was thrown, but he didn’t let that keep him from the important work of killing Nazis. He got his hands dirty (directly or indirectly) because there is no choice. He acted absolutely while aware of the limits of his own understanding and the arbitrariness of his own situation.

So, while I disagree with how existentialism understands the problem, I am in sympathy with its “solution.” I don’t like it. I just don’t know of a better one.

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Dan Gillmor writes about the scandal about electronic voting machines that’s just waiting to happen.

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Ok, I’m up and running in Mandrake, using kde as my desktop. So far so good…

The only hitch I hit when installing Mandrake was that it asked me for a CD that I didn’t have. I thought it must have been the third CD in the set, but I downloaded it twice and burned the image 3 times and it still wouldn’t accept it.
So, I finally said to just skip it, which it did without complaint. I think it might have been internationalization settings.

The kde desktop looks pretty and the file browser is modeled on Windows Explorer, which isn’t a bad thing. Since I’m writing this entry from the linux desktop, I am apparently connected fine.

It looks like it’s playing mp3’s, which I couldn’t get the RedHat distribution to do. Of course, I don’t hear any sound, but the file is generated a graphic sound wave in the xmms player, so that’s pretty much the same thing as hearing it, isn’t it? I refuse to be stopped by details!

The Mandrake Control center tells me that it didn’t install samba, required to see the Windows machines on my network. Hmm. I could have sworn that I checked that box during the installation process. Well, it’s installing samba now. And it’s found the folders on my XP laptop. Cool!

And now it’s lost them. Oh well, it was cool for a moment…Wait, they’re back!…But it can only see the directories…But it’s auto-configured the fstab file…. Alternating fits of coolness…

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Since I’ve been setting up linux on a spare machine simply as a way to explore linux from the point of view of a desktop user, and since I’ve been having problems with the RedHat 9 desktop environment, I decided to start all over with a clean install of Mandrake‘s linux distribution, including letting it redo the partitioning. Clean sweep, baby!

So far the installation has gone pretty easily (he said jinxing himself). I hit a bump at the beginning, but I can’t blame Mandrake for that. I’d downloaded the CD images and burned them last night. They’re readable in Windows and RedHat could see the files, but my linux machine wouldn’t boot from them. (It also wouldn’t boot from the Mandrake floppy booter I’d made. Odd.) So, I installed a new CD reader, and now it’s working fine. (So far.) It does make you wonder if the instability of the RedHat install was related to the flakiness of my CD player, although I’d be happier about that if it were crashing when it was accessing CDs.

Anyway, Mandrake has asked me the expected questions. This time I’m not being stingy about which packages it’s installing. It says I have 13 minutes to go…

Previous linux entry is here.

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The Democratic National Party is soliciting funds to air this commercial.

The ad twice shows Bush saying “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It then tells us that everyone knew that was false. But the real aim of the ad is, I believe, to hang that phrase around Bush’s neck the way the Republicans hung “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” around Clinton’s.

And the way the administration tried to wiggle out of it by claiming that the full statement – truncated in the ad – only said that the British had learned this, not that it was true, is more disingenuous than Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

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NPR’s All Things Considered ran a commentary of mine last night on wikis and social software. You can hear it by going here to launch the Real or Windows Media Player. Or, you can try clicking here to play it in the Real client.

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Jason Kottke’s got a classic example of how a little trust can double your business. It’s exactly the sort of math that so many businesses never think of computing.

(Thanks to Chris Worth for passing along the link.)

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For the past few weeks I’ve been noodling with an article on the Semantic Web. At the moment I’m particularly interested in the scope of its ambitions and whether they’ve changed over time. If you know about this and would like to talk with me, send me an email: [email protected].

Thanks.

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According to an article in Salon by Katharine Mieszkowski:

Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation niceties in fiscal year 2004.

Because otherwise the terrorists will have won.

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