2005 June

Nothing gets my ire up more than people who don’t pick up after their dogs. I’ve watched people letting their dogs relieve themselves on my lawn with no intention of picking it up, and then get upset when I’ve confronted them about it. So when I read this story out of Korea I was quite […]

As many of you have heard, Chinese bloggers have discovered that MSN Spaces China blocks users from putting the Chinese words for “freedom,” “human rights,” or “democracy” in the title of their blogs.
The Committee to Protect Bloggers (CPB), of which Peacefire is a member, has released a set of instructions describing how to hack MSN […]

Conceived by Ryan Fugger and quite formally defined by Sylvain Poirier, a new P2P-based monetary system is based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks.
By cutting out the institutional middlemen, it is both more community-oriented and more efficient as a means of exchange.
National monetary systems rely on trust in […]

While I agree with the Supremes on the P2P network lawsuit, I just as strongly disagree with them on their ruling in National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services. Background information: If a phone company has lines already in place, and another company wants to offer service as well, the first company […]

Today the Supreme Court ruled that P2P networks, such as Grokster and Morpheus, could be sued for the copyright infringements of their users. The main issue is that their marketing, while it has not stated they support piracy, it does nothing to discourage piracy and in fact when Napster was taken down they claimed they […]

I’ve been gone for about a year and half. I’ve had of a LOT of things going on. Moving, working, learning, etc. I’ve working on finishing my Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees and then I’ll be off to law school. I plan to practice Intellectual Property law. Point being, things are finally at a […]

Ever since blogs became popular China, the Communist Party has routinely threatened or shut down bloggers and website owners who write about politics in their country.
Since April 2005, when the law on non-profit website registration became effective, Chinese website owners are required to submit their real personal information when they register their websites.
Reporters Without Borders […]

Ever since I can remember I loved to look at maps. I could imagine standing in the places that I saw on the paper. Before I go anywhere on a trip I’ll pull out the map to get my bearings on the locale. So when I discovered Google Maps a while back I always have […]

Updating the Google Library entry of last week, the Google Watch.org has obtained a copy of Google’s agreement with the University of Michigan and posted it on the Internet. Start reading the saga here, and for the actual agreement, follow links here. The mystery is, of course, if the entire agreement is so confidential, […]

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative). A more abbreviated version is the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. Version 58 is now available. […]

“Orwellian” is, at the end of the day, just sort of a fancy way of saying “bald-faced lying,” isn’t it? Dress it up however you like, but Julie Cart of The Los Angeles Times (via Yahoo! News) writes:
The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on […]

Hmm, this is an interesting tidbit from a few weeks ago that seems to have escaped mainstream attention, so I figured I’d pass it along. One wonders how this sort of thing can happen in a country where we’re supposedly guaranteed freedom of (and from, if we so choose) religion under our constitution. Anyway, here’s […]

OK, while I would hardly say that Ms. McFadden is an impartial observer, she does have some points about the latest FX Networks craze - 30 Days. Like Ms. McFadden, I too feel that much of the show is exaggerated. The episode that comes to mind is the one about trying to scrape by on […]

Did you know that the State of Ohio had something called “eSchools”, which are computer- or Internet-based public charter schools?
Aunty didn’t know, until this came across her eDesk:
COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 13 /PRNewswire/ — Despite a comprehensive legislative study that says public eSchool funding is reasonable and should not be cut, Ohio’s […]

“
If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds — and at far lower cost, with far less risk.
“
This is what BusinessWeek writes in a long and well documented essay entitled “The Power of Us” that will be part […]

HoustonChronicle.com reports that a Federal panel has again upheld the Texas redistricting plan:

Someone at the DNC isn’t sending all of the memos to all of the right people. This has caused the Democratic leadership to speak somewhat disjointedly.

BusinessWeek reports on a new lawsuit seeking to overturn Utah’s new anti-pornography law.

Google slipped one past me, I must admit, when it quietly announced Google Print expanding into a Library Project Through its Publisher Program. I really should have paid more attention to the now unavailable news articles listed in the French Letters March post. Google put the focus on participating libraries: “We are currently working […]

On Monday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said that Republicans are “not very friendly to different kinds of people, they are a pretty monolithic party … it’s pretty much a white, Christian party.”