Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, a couple of pieces that may throw some oblique light on Weinberger et al's lengthy meditations on how ones personality is expressed and even formed though public writings.

Constance Rosenblum lost all her email:
But I was still baffled by the intensity of the psychological aftershocks, and even more than I wanted my old messages, I wanted someone to bring clarity to my feelings. Sherry Turkle turned out to be that person.
[...]
"People experience the computer as an extension of the self," Dr. Turkle pointed out. "It's an intimate machine, a mind machine. In a sense, you are your computer.

"We experience the data in the computer as durable, almost tangible. But when you lose your data, as you did, you realize that it is no more than where a bit, an electron, is sitting for a moment in time. And as a result of the loss, your own sense of fragility is enhanced."


Yet, Constance felt a sense of release at the loss, unfettered from others' chain letters, like Milosz.

Thomas Nagel writes on Nietszche , charting his struggle to disentangle and clarify the opposing Apollonian and Dionysian voices in his head. He needed to free his inner RageBoy.
To take oneself and one's world as given, and move forward intellectually and practically from that starting point, was in his view a betrayal of the extraordinary freedom that we possess as reflective beings. Nietzsche recognized that, like all human beings, he had reached consciousness with a sense of himself and a system of values that was produced by a tangled human history together with biological sources of which he was largely unaware. To take real possession of himself, to discover who he was and to decide who he wanted to be, required a bringing-to-consciousness of everything that lay beneath and behind the socially developed and educated human being--the constructed individual who handles the world with concepts, values, and methods of thought whose sources and true meanings he does not understand. It required a radical self-transformation.
[...]plunging beneath your own inner surface through both psychological and historical investigation is essential. But knowledge is not the main point. The point is to achieve a different kind of existence: to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world. Because we are not animals, we are in a position to take conscious possession of ourselves in this way; but because we are socialized human beings, we tend instead to accept the superficial identities and the orderly system of beliefs that civilization has assigned to us.

Perhaps.

For myself, I found an interesting echo of Marcus Aurelius in the advice I was given by a company lawyer after the Microsoft trial revealed the venal, vulgar and violent voices routinely used by that company's executives in internal email.

Never say anything in email you wouldn't want you mother to read on the front page of the newspaper.

I cherish the ambiguity there. Truly a rule to live by.

An article proclaims the death of DRM, but then goes on to offer hope that "some extremely bright people working in this space who will be able to figure out what the consumer is willing to put up with".

This misses the point. Value is established by what people are willing to pay. Making them put up with something is going to exact a cost.

By hampering their works with restrictions on copying, they are reducing their value to those they expect to purchase them. DRM schemes are value destruction mechanisms, as I pointed out to Universal.

What they should be thinking about is how to add value for their purchasers. In Universal's case, the answer is to adopt the Enhanced CD format (adding extra material for computer users) that is ubiquitous on CDs sold in the UK.

It looks like the FCC has got it completely backwards. Instead of regulating a separation between data transport and applications, it has reclassified data transport as a service, and thus removed open access requirements.
This is the exact opposite of the collective wisdom of the networking industry, as I collected here.

Powell today reiterated his opinion that all broadband platforms - cable, wireless, satellite and DSL - should be considered when crafting broadband policy.
"It's important to conceptualize broadband broadly," Powell told reporters following today's meeting.

It is indeed - but rather than prop up a series of monopoly rights, providing an opportunity for Howard Jonas to acheive his stated aim:

"Sure I want to be the biggest telecom company in the world, but it's just a commodity. I want to be able to form opinion. By controlling the pipe, you can eventually get control of the content."

Powell should be considering how to enable maximum flexibility by separating the commodity business of transferring packets from the open applications that define what the packets mean. This is how to maximise the value of the net for everyone, not for a few local monopolists - a fine job for a regulator.

John Perry Barlow has posted a great essay on sharing as the root of culture:

...just as sharing makes us civilized, it's sharing that makes civilization. It lets us build a great collective work from the exchange of stories, myths, songs, poems, facts, jokes, beliefs, scientific discoveries, elegant engineering hacks, and all of the other products of human thought and discourse.

But someone's trying to put a stop to this...

This is a brief test post using BlogApp It is supposed to include spell checking, which it does

Coursey is almost there with his email scheme, but he has it backwards.

You can implement the entire thing from the other end.

In your Mail client, filter all unsigned mail to the trash.
Mark all mail that contains a paypal 'you've got cash' signature to rise to the top.

Now all we need to do is make mail clients do this automatically , and sign and paypal 5 cents on outgoing mail we want read.

Bob Frankston is raving about his Mini Book PC. I don't get it at all. It 's 5" by 6" by 2". So what? - you need a screen and keyboard too, hence the ugly end result. My iBook is 1" by 9" by 11" - about 50% more volume, but it includes the screen, keyboard, DVD & CD-R etc, along with a battery for 5 hours and an Airport card for networking without wires.

I have a vague memory of reading Anarchy, the State and Utopia, and Alasdair Palmer's article made me want to re-read it, but I think I got a lot more out of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I try to avoid reflexive blogging about blogging, but I was trying to explain the significance of blogs to Stuart at lunch and this struck me afterwards.
The thing that makes blogs different from email is citation. I can paste URLs into email, but they are cumbersome, and launch the browser. With a tool like blogger you can read something on the web, add a comment and link to it in your blog straightaway. It is much easier than putting it in an email, especially for the reader, and it keeps a permanant record for you (or others) online. Once you get into it, you find that you read other people's blogs, and comment on them, and link to them as well. One interesting thing is that these make them very Google-friendly, so that increasingly if you search for a hot topic, a blog will have made it to the top because of these mutually-reinforcing links. (eg searching for 'trustworthy computing' gives you someone's blog). It is fulfilling the original concept of hyperlinked text on the web.

A blog is also great place to keep your �sprit d'escalier bon mots while waiting for an occasion to reuse them.

Doc wants the net everywhere his cellphone is. Henry Norr has that, but the speed sucks and it is too expensive.
Sounds like a phone company effort.
802.11 speeds (3 orders of magnitude faster) should be enough for the Cringely effect to kick in.
Maybe Mesh networks can pull it off.

You can tell my age by the fact that me and my friends Maf, Stu & Jem all have 3-letter nicknames. 3 letters is all you could fit into the highscore of Asteroids.

A lot of smart people say that we should separate network transport from application protocols. It seems that anyone who has thought about this carefully says the same thing, starting with Saltzer, Reed and Clark back in the early 80s, Cheshire in 1996, Isenberg in 1997, Cheshire again in 1998, Odlyzko in 1999, Reed again in 2000, Isenberg and Weinberger in 2001, and today Frankston.

We need a new Act to require this separation for the good of the internet, and all the users of it.
How about a Boucher-Hatch Internet Transparency Act?

Congressman Rick Boucher has written an excellent article on theDMCA's overreach. As I have said, copyright violation occurs when republishing, not when editing. Preventing editing limits the usefulness of the content, and thus reduces its value.

This is a great, simple statement of how networks are, and how they should be.

Andrew Odlyzko is one of the clearest thinkers on the future of the net, and he backs up his thoughts with good figures.
If only his name were easier to spell or pronounce, he'd be more widely known.

I wanted an excuse to play with Runtime Revolution which is a sort of multiplatform HyperCard thing, and I was tired of Googlewhacking by hand, so I've made the Pocket GoogleWhacker. Runtimes are available for:
Mac OS X
Windows
Mac OS 7,8,9 (Includes 68k Macs)
Linux

Hope you enjoy it. Send me 50 cents by paypal to kmarks@mac.com if you do.

Setting up wireless networks for sovereign nations, including those in the US. Sounds interesting

Every year, Beloit College in Wisconsin issues a list to help staff understand the mindset of students. I received a slightly edited version of the first 1998 list (class of 2002) by email, which was as follows:

1.Students starting college this fall were born in 1980.
2.They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.
3.They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf war was waged.
4.Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression.
5.There has only been one Pope.
6.They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart, and do not remember the Cold War.
7.They have never feared a nuclear war.
8.They're too young to remember the space shuttle Challenger blowing up.
9.Their lifetime has always included AIDS.
10.They never had a Polio shot, and likely, do not know what it is.
11.The expression "you sound like a broken record" means nothing to them.
12.The compact disc was introduced when they were 1 year old.
13.They likely have never played Pac Man, and have never heard of Pong.
14.Star Wars looks very fake to them, and the special effects are pathetic.
15.Blue M&M's are not new.
16.They have always had an answering machine.
17.Most have never seen a black & white TV.
18.They have always had cable.
19.They cannot fathom not having a remote control.
20.Roller-skating has always meant inline for them.
21.The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno.
22.Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.
23.The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as World War I and World War II, or even the Civil War.
24.Kansas, Boston, Chicago, America, and Alabama are places, not musical groups.

My son was born in 1995, which would make him class of 2017, I suppose. I wrote a list for him in 1998, and I think it is holding up well so far:

1.Students starting college this fall were born in 1995.
2.They have no meaningful recollection of Queen Elizabeth II.
3.They were toddlers when the Balkan war was waged.
4.The net stock crash of 1999 is as insignificant to them as the 1973 Oil Shock.
5.There has only been one Dalai Lama.
6.They were 9 when the EU broke apart, and do not remember Europe at peace.
7.They have never feared AIDS.
8.They're too young to remember Concorde.
9.Their lifetime has always included Computer viruses.
10.Wearing spectacles as anything other than dressing up makes as much sense as wearing bowler hats to work every day.
11.The expression "CD Quality Audio" means nothing to them.
12.The iMac was introduced when they were 3 years old.
13.They likely have never played Quake, and have never heard of Tomb Raider.
14.Titanic looks very fake to them, and the special effects are pathetic.
15.Blue skin tinting is not new.
16.IP addresses and telephone numbers seem equally arcane to them.
17.They don't understand the distinctions their parents make between computers, televisions, radios and newspapers.
18.Most have never seen a postage stamp.
19.They cannot fathom everyone watching the News at 10 - it is as odd as the concept of newsreels.
20.Commuting to work daily by car for 2 hours is as alien as accounting using paper and ink.
21.Any notion of scarcity of memory, processor speed, storage or bandwidth is on a par with 12 pennies to a shilling.
22.Chips have always been cooked in the microwave.
23.The Gulf War is as ancient history to them as World War II.
24.Cranberries, Fish, Cookies, and Meatloaf are foodstuffs, not musical groups.
25.Owning physical media to play music from it has to be explained to them very carefully, but they still don't get it.