Chilling Effects, sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Berkman Center, is a clearinghouse for Cease and Desist letters. This is a great idea! For net folk who receive a C&D, they can help you determine if the C&D has any real legal basis.
CNN.com - Deal reached at climate talks - July 23, 2001: “The 1997 treaty aims to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012.” It’s sad that the US couldn’t come to agreement on this. We probably emit less CO2 per car than a developing nation would, but I’m sure the US emits tons of greenhouse gases.
Talking Moose : MoosePoop: Moose’s Marketing Manifesto: “I will only evangelize a product that I both believe in and understand.” The world would be a better place if everyone followed these rules…
Brent Ashley talks about revising his website to more accurately portray what he does. Something I wonder: Does marketingspeak work on anyone? If not, why do people still do it? I have a real respect for salespeople and their relationship building skills (at least those of successful, professional salespeople). I’m just not sure how marketing fluff fits in.
I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion about how copyright terms are just too long. The original copyright term length was 14 years. Currently, the term length is up to the author’s life plus 90 years! Change begins with the actions of a few, and writers are possibly in the best position to do something about it.
The idea with the original copyright law is that creators of intellectual works should be given exclusive rights “for a limited time” so that they can earn some money on their creations. This is a very logical, and noble goal. But, the “limited time” part of the Constitution was left up to Congress. Technically, the current term length of life+90 is a limited time. But, there’s really no reason to believe that it won’t be extended again in another 10 years.
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IBM has produced an article with ideas on how to meter web services. This is will certainly be an important piece of software of the future.
Joel on Software - Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It.: “When you release 1.0, you might want to actually keep it kind of quiet. Let the early adopters find it. If you market it and promote it too heavily, when people see what you’ve actually done, they will be underwhelmed.” Another nicely written article from Joel.
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Jamie Zawinski brings us the Web Collage. Random terms are entered into search engines, and pictures from the located pages are put into the collage and rotated periodically.
Two bits of crazy law taking place in the US: a court ruled that a patent on software downloading is valid. In other news, a software developer was arrested in Las Vegas for his program that defeats the security of Acrobat files and for a talk he gave on the subject.
Look At The Numbers says this open source proponent. This article is useful if for nothing else than the links and citations to many studies that show the benefits of open source. Many good points are raised, and this article is a good one for arguing the case. It seems much heavier on data in favor of Linux as a server OS than as a client OS.
