The Economist: The internet in a cup (subscription required).
Nice story about how coffee houses used to be the place to meet for scientific or political discussions, planning a revolution, buying and selling, etc. I didn’t know about these coffee houses, and I didn’t know that the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London essentially started out as coffee houses. Sounds like interesting times. Ends with a parallel to today’s Stabucks with Wi-Fi, which is amusing. It’ll be interesting to see if wi-fi-enabled Starbucks patrons will actually start to talk to each other, or they’ll just sit and stare into their own laptop.
Clay Shirky: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed – as always, Shirky puts things in perspective. The comparison of the RIAA’s current approach to music file sharing to prohibition sounds about right. When you legislate against the interests of the general public, they find ways to circumvent legislation. When will the RIAA learn to profit from new technology instead of fight it?
Hartvig is using IT university students to do usability studies of Umbraco. Would be really good to do the same for OpenACS. Dalager, do you think you could help organize something (next semester, most likely).
Thanks to Malte, Guan, Vanessa, Joel, Peter, Simon for a nice, productive weekend adding some new features to the OpenACS blogger application. It’s starting to be really slick. I can’t wait to upgrade this site to a non-ancient version of the software. Maybe over the Holidays?
MS Fact sheet by the Lindows (and mp3.com) guy, Michael Robertson. Not particularly new, but still accurate.
Jonas sent me the link to this t-shirt with the words “Have fun in India!” :)
Seattle OKs Elvis Impersonator Cabbies. By way of Joel.
Under the new law, any driver choosing to wear a costume must pick a “readily identifiable and generally well-known public figure, personality or fictional character.”
Why a special law for what cabbies can wear, as opposed to what anyone else can wear at work? I don’t get it.
Very interesting and thoughful summary of Jill Walker’s UIB is using .LRN. Would be interesting to hook her up with the .LRN team, if they’re not already. Hey, Jill, why don’t you come to Copenhagen this weekend, we’re going to improve the blogging tool that’s integrated in .LRN … Thanks to
Joel lears to speak Danish. I’m sure he’s going to learn quickly … or at least produce a wealth of amusing blog entries in the process. I promise I, too, will flag everything he will ever try to say as suspect, and do my best to confuse his newfound knowledge by choosing words and pronunciation to completely mess up everything he thought he knew. :)
I’m contemplating a trip to Linux Asia 2004. Looks like this thing is really happening, and I want to go have a look for myself.
December 05, 2003 · 1 comment
Lessig: More SCO fud, this time insulting the constitution. When will this SCO madness stop, so we can get on with innovating.
