I just posted Friday’s update on our trip to boston.com although it takes a couple of hours for the update to “take.”

There are peace signs everywhere in this city. No other political signage, as far as I can tell.

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We’re in Venice on vacation. I’m blogging it for the Boston Globe. We’re counting on the second day being better than the first. Just a loooong, wearying day of travel.

By the way, the second blog entry on the Globe site is by my son, Nathan, 12. The Globe’s going to update it to reflect that.

Bad, expensive AOL connection from the hotel room. 650 emails waiting. I think I’ll flee the Net for the day.

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movabletype.org : TrackBack Explanation

Aha! Ben and Mena have posted a step-by-step guide to TrackBack.

Thanks!

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On Wednesday, 7 of us – my wife and two children, my in-laws and my sister-in-law – will be going to Venice and Florence for a week. That is, 3.5 days in each. I’ve been to Venice and Florence a few times, but if you have favorite places other than the Big Tourist Spots, want to let me know? (If you recommend restaurants, keep in mind that 4 of us are vegetarians and don’t eat fish.)

TIA, which used to mean Thanks In Advance before it meant Total Information Awareness.

By the way, I’ll be blogging it for the Boston Globe. Details soon.

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Niek Hockx giving one Dutch citizen‘s despairing reaction to Bush’s cowboy ultimatum last night: “Evil is out of its cage.”

Steve Kirsch on The Five Lessons of 911.

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Tim Bray, one of the fathers of XML, blogs about the NY Times reporting that Comcast is going to add services to its delivery of broadband. Tim knocks ’em upside the head:

Let’s lay it out in maximally-simple bullet-point form so anyone can understand it:

Fast pipe.

Always on.

Get out of the way.

You can’t get much clearer than that.

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A haiku:

Winding in the kite,
it pulls up so hard, it writes
a line in my skin.

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Stavros the Wonder Chicken parodies World of Ends. A sample:

A tip of the coxcomb to The WonderChicken…

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Richard Stallman is giving a free talk (what else?) on the Friday before SXSW (south by southwest) opens. The guy doing the introduction has just larded on the justified praise, and then said: “And after having Richard live in my house for a week, I can say that he’s a world class pain in the ass.” Big laugh from everyone, including Stallman.

Stallman talks without notes with the deliberateness of someone sure that his content alone will hold an audience.

He says that free software has several dimensions of freedom and benefits:

0. Freedom to run the program
1. Freedom to help yourself by changing the program to suit your needs
2. Freedom to help your neighbor by distributing the sofware
3. Freedom to help your community so others can benefit from your contribution

(Ah, zero-based lists. As far as I can see, all this does is make people add one when they tell someone how many bullets were on the list.)

“The same copyright laws that were unobbjectionable 40 years ago if they existed today would have serious problems.” He goes through several hundred years of technology and copyright law showing that laws that used to protect our interests now serve corporate interests. It goes for too long and it covers too much. We’re used to buying books, checking out from the library, lending them to a friend and re-reading them. Publishers want to take all of these rights away from us.

A first step: Shorten copyright on books to ten years. For software, maybe copyright should be for three years, with all the source code on escrow so it could then be released into the public domain.

There’s not reason copyright should be the same for all types of work. He sees three types of work:

1. Functional works that you used to do a job: manuals, reference works, recipes. All should be free. It’s important to society that people should be able to improve it.

2. “Documentaries that represent the thoughts of certain parties”: Memoirs, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell. To change these is to misrepresent someone’s thoughts. We should permit verbatim non-commercial copying.

3. Artistic and aesthetic works. On the one hand, the work has integrity and shouldn’t be modified. But then there’s the folk process. And Shakespeare took plots from other plays. But Stallman doesn’t know the answer to this one. “This is a hard problem.”

WRT Internet music company: “We should simply legalize it now.” We’d all be better off. The recording industry treats musicians like dirt. He feels bad when he buys a CD because he knows the musicians won’t see any of the money. Musicians really only get publicity out of their recording contracts. Internet music sharing is a better way to get publicity. Stallman would like digital cash so there could be a tip box for bands.

Zippy quote: “Those arrogant [recording industry] companies that think they can imnpose restrictions on us deserve to be punished. They deserve to cease to exist.”

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Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a damn fine piece of inventive fiction. It’s set in a society where there’s abundance rather than scarcity, which pretty well describes the economy of ideas in the book. It not only manages at least a meme a chapter, but it’s also got a twisty narrative with characters to care about. And it’s fun.

You can download it for free (75,000 people did in the first month) or would it be very old-fashioned of me to suggest that you buy a copy so Cory can make some money off the damn thing? You can even get one inscribed by the author his own self.

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