The latest Business 2.0 is all about the content industries' foolishness over copy 'protection', including a handy historical guide and blogs.

You would have thought they'd have found me for their blog guide then.

Ban Hazardous Coal Power Now!

US nuclear generation creates about 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year.
This worries people, and it is thus treated with lots of care, and its storage is the subject of much debate.

Coal generation, creates about 100 million tons. And it's exempt from being treated as hazardous waste!

Coal waste has approximately 20-30 parts per million of Uranium.

Lets do the maths then:

100 million tons x 25 parts per million = 2,500 tons of uranium from the coal industry per year.

So, the coal industry is generating more nuclear waste per year as the nuclear one, but they are just chucking it in landfills and the atmosphere.

And that's just counting Uranium, not other radionuclides - never mind greenhouse gases, Mercury and other toxins that last forever, unlike radioactive waste that has a half-life.

According to the DoE, there are 2-3 billion tons of coal finings already lying around near coal mines - enough that its worth them researching a way to turn them back into coal.

Getting us weaned from coal generation onto nuclear and other alternatives should be the focus of energy policy.

Google protects its search results - Tech News - CNET.com

Google protects its search results
This month, about 100 Comcast subscribers were temporarily shut out of Google when the search company charged the high-speed Internet access provider with hosting some accounts that had abused its terms of service by performing "automated queries." The crackdown cut a wide swath, taking out a block of IP addresses, shutting down the guilty and innocent alike.

"We are not accusing you personally of having violated our Terms of Service," said Google's notice to Emoungu, a computer programmer who has been a subscriber to Comcast's high-speed Internet service for two years. "You are most likely an innocent victim of someone else's bad behavior. We're really sorry to have had to take this action."

Those of us in the end-to-end, stupid network camp can find wry amusement in this - comcast is being penalised for making their network smart by violating end-to-end principles. If the google-hogging user's machine had a hard ip address, he could be filtered alone.

Google are not averse to programmatic use of their database - they just launched web APIs for it, though with a 1,000 query per day limit.

I do hope he's not running an exhaustive search for high-scoring GoogleWhacks - that would make me feel guilty...

The Atlantic | April 2002 | Seeing Around Corners | Rauch

A few good men can transform society

This article is about modelling human societies through simple cellular automata. It shows many interesting emergent behaviours, and how you can resolve the iterated prisoners dilemma with a few good men and true. But can too much information be a bad thing?

"There are plenty of different cities and countries that have gone from a high degree of corruption to a low degree of corruption," Hammond says. His A-society suggests that in such a transition, the fear of being caught may be at least as important as the odds of actually being caught. To test that possibility, Hammond re-ran his simulation, but this time he allowed all the agents to know not just how many of their friends were in jail but how many people were jailed throughout the whole society: in other words, the agents knew the odds of arrest as well as the police did. Sure enough, fully informed agents never got scared enough to reform. Hammond's A-society seemed to have "grown" a piece of knowledge that many law-enforcement agencies (think of the Internal Revenue Service, with its targeted, high-profile audits) have long intuited - namely, that limited resources are often more effectively spent on fearsome, and fearsomely unpredictable, high-profile sweeps than on uniform and thus easily second-guessed patterns of enforcement.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I've been at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas this week. Vegas doesn't suit me - call me an ascetic bookworm, but its plastic recreations of other places, suffused with the perpetual ding-ding-ding of slot machines does not attract me.

Reading Edward. O. Fritts address I found this passage not to my taste either:
On the evening of the attack itself, 60 million Americans tuned in to broadcast TV. The American people tuned to us by a four-to-one margin over the major cable news networks combined.

Radio also played an important role -- and one-third of all people say that they are now listening to radio more than they did before September 11th. During those days of terrorism and trauma, you didn't hear the notion that broadcasting was no longer relevant. Our relevancy was obvious. And it was immediate. The horrible tragedy of September 11th pulled this often-divided nation together. And it did something else. It reaffirmed that broadcasting remains competitively relevant...technologically vibrant...and constant in its civic purpose. Indeed, this was our finest hour.

He did attack the CARP rates:
...we were extremely disappointed by the rate structure set by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel with respect to radio streaming. It's puzzling to us why those who control the music industry want fees to be excessive to the point that many radio stations will be driven off the Web. We believe the CARP panel misinterpreted the intent of Congress and erroneously imposed high rates on broadcasting, and we're fighting to have the opinion voided.

In all of our battles, let's not forget that the services of broadcasters come free to the public. Few things are free anymore with the exception of the public library and over-the-air broadcasting...and we are going to fight to keep it free.

So it seems he is in agreement wiht the unanimous rejection of the CBDTPA

Later Marc Andreessen was pointing out the truth
As film studios and recording studios urge Congress to extend copy protection to every home entertainment device, Andreessen said the entertainment industry need look no further than the software industry's own expensive, failed attempts at encryption to realize it is ineffective at stopping piracy.

``If a computer can see it, display it and play it -- it can copy it,'' said Andreessen, in a keynote address to the National Association of Broadcasters convention.

Their response was not recorded.

I bumped into Bob Cringely, whose Open Source TV idea sounds interesting.

I also managed to read Lessig's 'Future of Ideas' which ends with thoughtful suggestions on restoring a creative commons.

Calendar Live - Press Play to Access the Future

DVD extra features start to deconstruct films
'Once computers become married with film, the form becomes promiscuous, and that can bring about new ways of making movies that the studios can't control.'
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

Lets hope so.

Et tu, Sony?

One would have thought that Sony, which is both a computer company and a media publisher, would have a more enlightened attitude than Universal to digital media.
Wrong!
Universal claim to value my business, but produce corrupt CDs that are no use to me.

Sony go one stage further, and issue CDs designed to crash my computer.

Here in California, we have laws against that kind of thing.

Steve Zellers' Radio Weblog

Steve Zellers' Radio Weblog says:
When your MP3 player goes to play one of these things, it checks to see if you played it before. If not, it puts up a dialog:

Do you have the rights to play this music?

If the user clicks no, it takes them to a website where they can perhaps acquire said rights. If they say Yes, then they'll not be asked again.

Again, this makes the default assumption that users are thieves. Groping towards a sensible idea, but still annoying enough to be worth subverting.

Edemame

Edemame
The dominant cultural motif of the 20th century in America was standardisation of processes, attempting to achieve economies of scale, with a veneer of choice.

This came home to me most clearly when I was sequestered in a basement at Electronic Arts in San Mateo with Maf in 1994, completing the first version of 3D Atlas by working round the clock, with brief breaks for food and sleep. Having flown in from London, we were jet-lagged to start with, and there being 10 testers giving us bug reports to address, our anomie was amplified.

We would emerge at random intervals into the bright California sunlight, and try to find something to eat nearby, a task made harder by the implosion of nearby Fashion Island Mall into the ghost mall so accurately described by Coupland in Microserfs.

We would stagger into Rocking Robin, or Togos or whatever, and then be subjected to the standard fast food quiz by the Turing-test-failing waitroids:

-Howchallikeitdone?
-Ummm... medium
-Souporsalad?
-Salad please
-Whakinadressing?
-Olive Oil vinagrette
-'taliando?
-OK

This is the approach described by the phrase 'Just the way you want it'.

One day, tired and phased, I went through the wrong door into Togos, and somehow ended up in a newly opened Japanese restaurant. At 2.30pm, it was quiet, so I walked up to the sushi bar. The sushi chef bowed to me, said hello, and looked at me carefully. He said 'You need to eat this' and handed me something delicious and wonderful. He was absolutely right. I ate it, and he produced more delightful fishy foods, and served me tea.

One of the the things I ate there that day (and all subsequent lunchtimes while we were there) was Edemame. This simple dish consists of small green beans boiled in their shells, then sprinkled with salt and allowed to cool. You pop them out of the shell into your mouth, the salt on your fingers adding piquancy.

It wasn't until years later that I realised that this delightful dish was made from Soya beans. School dinners in England frequently featured sausages or burgers manufactured from soya protein by the food processing industry. They had somehow decided that what we really wanted was vaguely meat-like food products made out of these beans, with their flavour disguised by adding fat and pepper. The contrast between these fresh, healthy, tasty green vegetables and the slimy, tasteless, beige sausages was so great that they were in no way recognisable as the same thing.

Here on the web we can find the Edamame in the authentic voices of the people we meet, and shun the processed sausages of the content industry.

The CBDTPA Is Immune to (Conventional) Criticism

Now this a scary thought:

The CBDTPA Is Immune to (Conventional) Criticism And so it is with the CBDTPA. The details of enforcement are absurd.

The framers of the bill have some dim sense of this, and they have tried to address it. The CBDTPA includes a few clauses to the effect of "And enforcement of this law shall not be absurd." Imagine a law that says "It shall be illegal to posses the ability to jaywalk, but the rights of the people to move freely shall not be lessened." Well, simply saying that doesn't make it so. You can have the law enforced and absurd, or not enforced (in which case, let's leave it off the books.) Same for the CBDTPA; the law as written has some attempts to wave the absurdity away, but it just doesn't work. It is impossible to salvage the invalid form of the law, no matter how you gussy up the appearence, just as no matter how much you add to an argument based on affirming the consequent, you still have an absurd argument.

Holding our email hostage by David Reed

Holding our email hostage by David Reed Any sensible design would be working hard on creating an identity system at the edges. It may be that the SMTP transport will self-destruct by failing to provide connectivity sufficient to be useful, in which case, the smart money would best be placed on providing an alternative, universal internet that doesn't try to understand identitiy at all, surrounded by better email clients that understand identity, because they deal directly with users and authenticate users on an end-to-end basis. It's easy to kill spam in such a system, and since the spam warriors are about to kill the present system, it'll have to be ready for the refugees.

I think he's right - we need to use digital signatures for ID, but we won't until Mail clients make this automatic.

Ebert picks up on Universal

Roger Ebert has noticed the foolishness of copy-protected CDs. He goes even further than I did when I corresponded with Universal Records about it in January.

The late, unlamented DivX scheme represented the same idiotic marketing reasoning that the Universal Music Group has implemented. So did the Hollywood studios' original opposition to home video. We live in a time of buzz, when musical reputations are formed below the radar of the accountants of the music industry. The way to launch a new CD is to get it talked about�not to insult potential fans by making it unplayable on their equipment even after they buy it legitimately.

Peter Cohen reports that Universal plans to offer refunds to customers who buy a disc and find they cannot play it. He also observes, "Many retailers employ a no-return policy once the CD's wrapper is off." And wisely so, since it would be the easiest thing in the world to buy a disc, rip it to your computer through your stereo, post it on the Web, and then return the CD for a refund. Did I just say that?

Robert Harris decribes the Villa of the Papyri
There may be lost plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, or even the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as well as a host of other Greek writers. A contemporary copy of Lucretius's poem, On the Nature of Things - which has been recovered - suggests that the villa may yield contemporary copies of Virgil's Aeneid, or copies of Horace, or even Catullus (whose poems have only come down to us in the most tenuous form, via one corrupt medieval manuscript, itself now lost). And it must be possible that a family capable of owning such a villa also possessed a copy of Livy's History of Rome, of which more than 100 of the original 142 books are missing.

In short, in the words of the campaigners (and these are cautious academics, remember): "We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined."

More here, here and how they managed to read them here

Robert Redford's Oscar speech:
We have a great industry and we all know that. We're here because we know it, we love it. It's a solid and healthy industry, but even though it is, I really believe it's going to be important in the years to come to make sure we embrace the risks as well as the sure things. To make sure the freedom of artistic expression is nurtured and kept alive. Because I believe that in keeping diversity alive, it will help keep our industry alive.
As we can see of late, the world around us is in a seachange. It is just simply not the same world anymore. As we all struggle to find our way with it, to get a grip, to make sense out of the chaos and the destruction and the tragedy, one word that emerges is the word "freedom." Its importance, its rarity and how fortunate we are to have it. To be able to be part of a freedom of expression that allows us as artists to tell our stories in our own way about the human condition, the complexities of life, the world around us, is a gift. And not one to be taken lightly. And I think the glory of art is that it cannot only survive change, it can lead it.

I hope Valenti and Hollings were listening.