Posts

If you’re trying to keep up with the latest on the Sony DRM/copy protection debacle, I’d recommend reading Ed Felten’sFreedom to Tinker, Bruce Schneier, or Boing Boing. What I wanted to talk about a little bit is the implications of this scandal. I like the convenience of the iTunes Music Store and the prices are fine with me, but I rarely purchase tracks there because I don’t like the idea of Apple’s DRM causing me problems down the line when I want to move my music to a new computer or something. I prefer the freedom that buying a CD offers – you rip it and you have an unencumbered digital copy, and a physical copy to fall back on if your hard drive crashes. It seems to me though that the copy protection Sony licensed changes the rules. ...

Kash at Angry Bear has an interesting post on free trade. He puts forth 7 observations, and then comes to this conclusion: So now to the real question: Why do economists like me, who profess to care about individuals, continue to think international trade is generally a good thing? (Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to get into this… but let me make just one point…) Here’s the reason: The negative or positive impact of trade is ultimately an empirical question (see point #2 above), and the evidence I’ve seen in my years of researching this subject suggests that the negative effects are outweighed by the positive. Actually, to be more precise, the evidence I’ve seen mostly suggests that the effects of trade are pretty small in a country like the US. Some people win from trade, and some lose from trade (just as is the case with any new technology)… but overall, though the effects are small, trade seems to make life better for most people. Not just for corporations: for people. ...

Here’s Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s Veteran’s Day post for 2005, which I mentioned yesterday.

So one of the things Sony’s DRM rootkit/spyware/malware does is completely conceal any files with names beginning with $sys$. Another thing that it does is prevent you from burning CDs with copy protected material on them. Well, one blog reports that if you rename your CD burning software so that the copy protection software conceals it, the other part of the copy protection software won’t stop you from burning the CDs. ...

TodayTomorrow is Veteran’s Day, originally set aside to commemorate the armistice that ended the Great War in 1918. Teresa Nielsen-Hayden always posts an incredible set of links, but she hasn’t done so yet for 2005, so you’ll have to settle for the 2004 list. Update: I have exposed the ugly secret that I usually don’t know what day it is.

Am I the only person who has noticed that more and more companies are using the user management facilities in phpBB to manage identity across their entire Web sites? The ability to create, update, and otherwise manage user accounts is functionality that has to be built for most Web sites, and it seems like a lot of people are just opting to use the features already built into phpBB rather than building something new. At first I associated this trend mostly with Web sites associated with games, like Curse Gaming and Warcraft Realms, but it’s popping up elsewhere as well. For example, the folks who sell MyEclipse use the forum login for handling all account issues, including keeping track of who’s allowed to download their products. ...

The bad news from yesterday is that the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 yesterday to add “intelligent design” to the state’s standard for science education. The good news is that in Dover County, Pennsylvania, all eight school board members who mandated the teaching of intelligent design were defeated by a slate of candidates opposed to making the county a national embarrassment. Next year, Kansas voters can do the same thing – four of the six board members who favor intelligent design are up for reelection. ...

Despite the fact that I live in North Carolina, I’m endorsing the ballot initiatives in California and Ohio that would shift responsibility for drawing Congressional districts to nonpartisan panels. In California, the intiative is backed by the loathsome Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republicans, and opposed by the Democratic party, but I’m for it anyway. The current system serves mainly to protect incumbents or shuffle things for partisan advantage, and I think it’s important for us to change the rules so that Congressmen see their jobs as something more than lifetime appointments and to encourage constituent service. I honestly have no idea how the composition of Congress would change if every state drew its districts in a nonpartisan fashion, but I believe such a system would be preferable to one where partisans sit down and shuffle precincts around with specific political goals in mind. ...

Dahlia Lithwick has a warning for Senate Democrats heading into Sam Alito’s confirmation hearings that they’d do well to heed: It will, unless Democrats get it together, become yet another Jerry Lewis telethon, raising national awareness about the dangers of “judicial activism” and the plague of “the reckless overreaching of out-of-touch liberal elitist judges.” Democrats in the Senate either will not or cannot put the lie to these trite formulations. They need to shout it from the rooftops: that blithely striking down acts of Congress is activism; that the right’s hero Clarence Thomas may be the most activist judge on the current court; that reversing or eroding long-settled precedent is also activism; and that “legislating from the bench” happens as frequently from the right as the left. ...

Have any of you NetNewsWire users found NNW to be intolerably slow on any operations involving WebKit after installing Mac OS X 10.4.3? When I open a tab in NetNewsWire to view the link from an item, it takes forever to switch to that tab, and closing tabs and switching back is incredibly slow as well. I have no idea if the updates to WebKit are to blame, but that’s where I’m pointing the finger right now. To fix the problem for now I’ve told NNW to just open links in my default browser rather than using the internal browser. ...