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October 31, 2003
Sheila Lennon interviews the hosts of a new liberal talk show, Outrage Radio that debuts Nov. 13. (I agree with her that the name stinks.) Excellent interview. E.g., one of the hosts says:
Reagan’s HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout.
Great factoid, if true.
An article in Science reports that “in more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science”
Internet references accounted for 2.6% of all references (672/25548) and in articles 27 months old, 13% of Internet references were inactive.
That’s higher than I’d have expected for references presumably to scientific journals, but lower than I’d expect for references to the general-interest Net.
(Thanks to Gary Unblinking Stock for the link.)
I’m at the Dean HQ in Burlington today where they actually make you sign in now – it’s getting so grown up! – but it still feels like the best entrepreneurial company you ever worked at.
I laughed at a “Soylent Dean” – “My God! His campaign! It’s made out of people!” – posted on Joe Trippi’s door. I’d missed it when it ran in the Dean weblog.
There’s also a link to the campaign to have Dean supporters write personal letters, by hand, to undecided voters in NH and Iowa. I did last week. It felt oddly good.
October 30, 2003
According to Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works there are four classes of works whose copyrights copy protection we’re allowed to do a technological end run around [Thanks to Matt Morse for the correction]:
(1) Compilations consisting of lists of Internet locations blocked by commercially marketed filtering software applications that are intended to prevent access to domains, websites or portions of websites… [many qualifications follow]
(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.
(4) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook’s read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.
Unfortunately, I lack the cryptographic key that would allow me to understand this, but it sure sounds like these are too few and too random. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.]
Someone posted this as a comment on my skeptical blogging of a reported denial of service attack on a group that “outs” what it thinks are terrorist sites. This arabic site looks like it is planning a DoS against Internet Hagannah to me.
It is a list of ip addresses.
That page has been removed for “administrative purposes.”
October 29, 2003
Photos of the California fires by R. Hannes Niedner, including (on page 2) the sunspots visible through the smoke and haze.
There are more of R’s photos here. (Thanks to Jesus Castagnetto for the link.)
October 28, 2003
…as one of his first acts as governor he’ll create a state telecommunications agency called “SkyNet.”
Michael Cudahy writes on the speculation that W will dump Cheney and take Rudi Giuliani for his VP. He argues that the Democrats need Republican votes and that the Dean campaign has not been receptive to that imperative.
I just gave a talk at the first Ascential user conference. I was talking mainly about how metadata is rooted in human desire. Afterwards, Bernard Plagman approached me and struck up a conversation. He apparently is the person who coined the term “metadata” in an article in 1971. Back when he wrote Data Dictionary/Directory Systems (Wiley, 1974), it was necessary to argue that metadata ought to be managed the same way data is.
And now, a short 30 years later, metadata is the new data.
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