You know Richard Stallman’s “Free as in speech, not free as in beer”? I think we could stand to add one more: Free as in peanuts.

If you’re in a bar, speaking freely and paying for beer, the bartender sometimes will put out a dish of peanuts for free. I know that I’m capable of eating an entire bowlful and then eying the bartender waifishly until s/he refills it. But, I generally won’t buy peanuts in a bar, even if they’re reasonably priced. I get value from eating them, yet I won’t pay for them.

I’m sure economists have a word for this—probably something like “You cheap bastard”—but I’m going to make up my own anyway: freechasing, pronounced like “purchasing.” It means taking for free items you value but that you wouldn’t have paid for.

Freechasing is only interesting when it’s applied to goods that—unlike peanuts—are not diminished by being consumed. A while ago a teacher told me that she didn’t use a chapter of my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined because she didn’t want to ask her students to buy the entire volume. She should have instead freechased the chapter by printing up some copyright-bustin’ copies. Since she wasn’t going to buy the book, she wouldn’t have been depriving me or my publisher of any money. And freechasing the chapters would have created some value: She obviously thought it would have some salutary effect on the students (presumably as they sharpened their logical skills by ripping it to shreds), and it’d be in my long term interest to have students introduced to my writing.

Likewise, I’ve freechased some music that’s enriched my life and has introduced me to artists I’ve since bought music from. I bet you have, too. (Question: Is listening to the radio freechasing music? How about if you turn it down during the ads?)

Freechasing by definition does no harm and creates value. But, it’s sometimes awfully hard to tell if you’re freechasing or if you’re not. It’s so easy to freechase that early Dylan album that maybe I’m just telling myself that I wouldn’t have purchased it. And if they drop the Dylan album’s price far enough, maybe I would have purchased it if I hadn’t already freechased it. Counterfactual life is tough to figure.

Anyway, this idea isn’t new and the neologism is ugly. But it’s Sunday.

[Tags: filesharing free]

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Tony Judt in the London Review of Books excoriates American liberals for acquiescing in Bush’s foreign policy.

Some of it will be familiar to Americans. And he ignores liberals who have been against the Iraq war from the beginning, focusing on traditional liberals who supported it. Plus, the article suffers (imo) from the predictable, one-sided criticism of Israel and a lack of any suggestion of what contemporary liberalism consists of beyond fighting Bushism. Nevertheless, there’s lots in it that I found illuminating, including:

…the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

And I think Judt is right in his fundamental observation that we don’t have the set of outspoken, respected, liberal thinkers and politicians that we had during the Vietnam war or during the cold-hearted Reagan years. To a large degree, I think this is because we haven’t gotten past the anger stage of grieving for the death of our childhood on 9/11. We’re still not willing to hear that terrorism is not an enemy that can be defeated (because it’s a tactic), that we are never going to be as safe as we once imagined ourselves to be, that the world shrugs off simple answers, that working to connect the world will make us safer than our power can (they brought down the World Trade Center with boxcutters, after all), that the best way to foil terrorists is to shut up about what you’re doing, that crime is a more apt metaphor than war for the struggle we’re in, that peace makes us safer than war and peace requires connection and fairness. If these are things that cannot be heard, then the speakers—and there are plenty of them around—have to be marginalized for psychological if not political reasons. [Tags: liberalism tony_judt politics terrorism]

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This 9.5-minute video from Princeton shows that a Diebold touchscreen voting machine can be hacked. In this case, the hack was inserted by writing it onto a machine’s memory card. (The machine’s lock is highly pickable. Or you can simply unscrew the cover. Yikes.) It took them less than a minute to insert malicious code. Worse, it can be written as a virus so that it spreads from machine to machine via memory cards.

The Diebold model they hacked produces a paper trail. But the hack causes the intended vote to print out while recording the vote the hacker wants recorded.

(Thanks to Jock Gill for the link.) [Tags: elections diebold]

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I spent an hour and a half last night with a handful of other Brookliners calling our neighbors on behalf of Deval Patrick, reminding them that the primary is this Tuesday. I’ve done phone banking (which is not the same as banking by phone, by the way) before, but I’ve never met such solid support among the people I called.

Of course, if the unabashedly liberal, Clinton-appointed, grass-rooted, African-American Patrick can’t sweep Brookline, he’s not going to sweep anywhere. Still, it was more than a little fun.

Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday, especially if you live in Massachusetts. [Tags: politics deval_patrick]

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“On my way over here, I was reminded of a story…”

Fifteen years ago, business executives were required to begin formal presentations with a joke. My European friends couldn’t understand why we insisted on having our CFOs and Sales VPs introduce themselves by doing a short stand-up routine. But now—based on almost no evidence, so please tell me if I’m wrong—it seems to me that Americans have shoved their inner Leno back into the small packing crate where he belongs.

No? If yes, why? [Tags: business jokes]

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Global Voices is running a Chinese protest video that the Chinese government doesn’t want you to see.

Digital Rights Ireland has started legal action against the Eueopean data retention laws. [Tags: digital_rights china global_voices ireland]

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Gorgeous photos of libraries. You remember libraries, right? The place with all the books. You remember books, right? Paper? Atoms? Hell-o-o? Is this thing on?

(Thanks to Sven Cahling for the link.) [Tags: libraries books everything_is_miscellaneous photos]

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In English, chopping a tree down is not the opposite of chopping it up. Throwing in the towel is not the opposite of throwing out the towel. Taking someone in is not the opposite of taking someone out. Throwing a sandwich down is not the opposite of throwing it up.

What are other examples of opposite prepositions used in non-opposite ways? [Tags: doep puzzle]

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This Congress has spent less time in session than any Congress since 1948. So, the Sunlight Foundation is offering citizens $1,000 for each member of Congress that can persuade to sign the Punch Clock Agreement to put their daily schedules on the Internet. Cheesy video here. [Tags: congress sunlight punch_clock]

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danah boyd has a terrific essay on Facebook and privacy. Now I understand what the big deal was.

Here is danah’s summary:

* Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.

* The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.

* We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?

* Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.

* Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?

* Facebook lost its innocence this week.

And here’s a snippet from the article that makes what I think is a crucial point for the privacy debate:

In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of “private” as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it’s exposed or not…

Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there’s a privacy issue.

Now go read the whole thing. It will be on the test. [Tags: privacy : facebook danah_boyd]

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