Mike Godwin’s article The Right to Tinker (Edward Felten) makes an excellent argument for the importance of the freedom to tinker. The copyright protection schemes that some in Washington and Hollywood want to implement will choke off the innovation that has been the driving force of the American economy. They will do so by outlawing our tradition of taking things apart, studying them, discussing them, and making them better. Do we really value entertainment so much that we are willing to sacrifice public knowledge for it?
I’d gladly give up all mainstream movies, musical recordings, and television programming to keep my right to tinker. If I hadn’t been able to study and hack code a few years ago, I might still be serving popcorn and soda at the theater or risking my life in the steel warehouse.
Not to mention that I think we’d all be better off if Hollywood fell off the face of the Earth. But that’s a topic for later.
When I look at this, all I can do is laugh. (credit to Kottke)
As much as I like the Mozilla browser, I have to admit that it’s a dog when running in OS X. I decided to drop the Mozilla browser in favor of Chimera, a lean OS X browser that uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. I couldn’t be happier with the decision.
To make things even better, this morning I learned that there is now a lean Gecko-based browser for Windows called Phoenix. So far, I’m impressed.
(Yes, I know about K-Meleon. It doesn’t have many of the features that make me want to use Mozilla.)
Whoever did CNN’s redesign made a big mistake. They obviously failed to do any testing in Mozilla-based browsers. This is especially funny because they are part of the Netscape Network, maker of a Mozilla-based browser.
Actually, they made many mistakes. Like the choice to make things even more cluttered than before. I just thought that the browser problem was the most glaring.
David Brin’s Commentary on Attack of the Clones is brilliant. I especially like the part where he explains how Episode III could be written to make the whole series make sense. If George Lucas were smart he’d take Brin’s thoughts to heart.
This is why I double check my e-mail before clicking the send button. (via Dave Winer)
In his latest piece at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes, “During an invitation-only briefing last Thursday, a National Security Council official told about two dozen attendees from civil liberties groups and trade associations that the White House had no problem with the Internet’s ‘monoculture’ environment.”
