Blue Sky On Mars

A father-son team in Spokane built this nifty electric car called the Tango:

At 39 inches wide and 8 feet 5 inches long, it’s skinnier than some motorcycles and shorter than many a living-room couch. It runs on batteries, not gas.

People may be more readily accepting of this than the Segway. Only time will tell, however, if people really are willing to pay the price for environment-friendliness.

Robert Cringely has an idea for working around the RIAA in putting together a new music service. His idea centers around the notions of ownership and fair use. In a publicly traded company, the owners of the company are the stockholders. So, Cringely figures, create a company that buys a bunch of CDs and allow the “owners” of those CDs (the stockholders) to download MP3 backups of the music. He envisions a very low price point, with none of the money circulating back to artists and labels.

The questions that are left unanswered in this are what will Snapster do against competitors, and what will the company do after there are no more CDs to buy?

That second question is exactly on the mark for the problem here. Yes, the RIAA members tend to make contracts that drag their artists through the mud. But, the fact of the matter is that the RIAA provides services to the artist that no one has yet duplicate: production and promotion.
Cringely writes, correctly, that the costs of production have come way down. That’s true, assuming that the artists have the talent to not only perform, but write, produce and mix the songs. There are a number of people involved in the production side of things that need to earn a living.

The Internet could certainly produce new promotional opportunities, but the musicians that generate the most revenue are the ones that get promoted to radio.

Cringely’s idea is quite interesting (and has implications for software, too!), but the only really sustainable model is one that ensures that the creators of the work can earn a living.

For those that have been following my blog, the lack of activity over the past few days has probably seemed a little unusual. I had mentioned earlier in the year that we’re having a baby (and added the “Parenting” category, which seems slightly out of place with all of the geeking out that happens here).

On July 24th, our baby girl was born! Her name is Crysania and she’s really cute. I’ll post a picture later, and I’m sure there will be more pictures coming. At some point, I’ll write about the birth itself. Quite an experience, and these last few days have been an interesting introduction to parenting. I’m glad that I’m taking two weeks off of work.

I haven’t gotten to read this yet, but I wanted to leave myself a bookmark for it: Saving the Net

MIT opts for student rights when torn between a restriction on giving away student information and a subpoena from the RIAA.. Verizon says that they’ll only comply after legal options are exhausted, whereas Comcast will happily turn over information. Always interesting to see who works with their constituents.

John Gilmore was removed from a British Airways flight for wearing a button that said “Suspected Terrorist”:

After the whole interaction was over, I offered to tell her, just for her own information, what the button means and why I wear it. She was curious. I told her that it refers to all of us, everyone, being suspected of being terrorists, being searched without cause, being queued in lines and pens, forced to take our shoes off, to identify ourselves, to drink our own breast milk, to submit to indignities. Everyone is a suspected terrorist in today’s America, including all the innocent people, and that’s wrong. That’s what it means. The terrorists have won if we turn our country into an authoritarian theocracy “to defeat terrorism”. I suggested that British Airways had demonstrated that trend brilliantly today. She understood but wasn’t sympathetic — like most of the people whose individual actions are turning the country into a police state.

This account does raise interesting questions. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that British Airways is (I believe) a British company and the flight was heading toward a foreign country and BA quite possibly does not have to follow our First Amendment.

John is right to point out, though, that we all need to be vigilant to ensure that our rights are not being trampled upon by people who are overzealous in trying to protect us. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are written as they are for good reason, and those are the standards we should be upholding.

No Earth-shattering changes here, but Eclipse 3.0 M2 does have a number of nice new features. I’ve been using 3.0 M1 since it came out, and I can say that the “stable build” is an accurate depiction. It works great!

This is my kind of study:

A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular pizza-eaters were 59 percent less likely to contract cancer of the esophagus, while the risk of developing cancer of the colon fell by 26 percent.

Of course, maybe this only impacts Italians (and maybe the pizza they serve in Italy is different). But, still, it’s encouraging!

Thank you, snopes! According to the new Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Metallica) article, yesterday’s story about Metallica suing over the E, F chords is false. I should know enough to look at the URL and realize that the article yesterday was not actually MTV.com.

Though we on JavaBlogs had pretty much figured stuff out, Slashdot provoked answers from the FSF. David Turner himself responded and had a nice summary of what Section 6 of the LGPL really means:

1. Make sure your licensing follows the simple requirements in the 1st para of section 6.

2. Provide the LGPL library in a separate jar, and allow that jar to be replaced by newer versions of the library. This is only one of the possible ways to comply, but it’s certainly the easiest.

3. Make available the source code for the LGPL library.

The 1st requirement above is that your license does not deny the customer the ability to reverse engineer for their own use.