Blue Sky On Mars

The rise of the Net has led to all kinds of interesting legal questions. I’m not a lawyer, but some of these new questions raised are pretty interesting. Adam Penenberg says that Google News doesn’t show ads because of legal questions. The notion is that carring headliens and lead paragraphs from news sources is in all likelihood fair use when you’re not making money from it. Mix money into the equation, and you might just run afoul of copyright law.

Fair use is a tricky balance. On the one hand, Google drives traffic to news sites whose articles get prominent placement on Google News. On the other hand, Google News may very well displace front page hits of news sites (it is one of the top 10 news sites), and it shows news from many sources. Just looking above the fold, I see more than a dozen news sources.

Desktop aggregators would seem to be safe, because that’s just software run by individual users. Services like Bloglines, on the other hand, would seem to have the same issues that Google does.

I don’t think there has been a case yet that has touched on this particular issue. I’d guess that it’s only a matter of time before there’s a test.

You can never have too many political top ten lists. Bush’s Top Ten Flip-Flops. Personally, I think that the “flip flop” thing is generally overblown. People can change their minds over time as new facts come in. That’s only natural. Actions speak louder than words.

Here we are, 15 minutes before the first presidential debate of this election season. Thank goodness for NPR. NPR : Connie Rice: Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates

I had been hoping to see a lively, entertaining debate, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it.

As promised, J2SE 5.0 was released today. Certainly a big release, and I think everyone’s pretty much aware of the features. Now that 5.0 has been released, there’s a good probability that the project I’m working on may be able to start working with it within a month. There are certainly good features. The trick will be ensuring that all of the libraries we use will not have problems.

The Java folks are good at backwards compatibility (almost to a fault!), so I expect the problems will be minimal. Still, some of the packages we use involve code generation, and I could imagine some of those things needing some changes. The betas have been out long enough, though, that most active open source projects have at least been played with using the new version.

I haven’t had time to be much of a music geek since Crysania was born. That said, I still think it’s cool that Amazon.com: now has a Musical Instruments store.

Missed this by a couple of days: Eclipse 3.1 M2 News. Java 1.5 should be out any day now… I’m hoping to be able to start working with Java 1.5 soon!

Here’s a very nice free resource for PowerBook owners: the PowerBook FixIt Guide Series. Do it yourself repair and upgrade manuals for many PowerBook models. Nicely done.

Last week, a photo that purported to be a Rand Corporation mock computer of 2004 was circulating widely on the net. It was a nifty, seemingly plausible picture (though I did wonder what the steering wheel was for :). Snopes has the scoop, though. It’s a hoax. Or, not so much a hoax but a photoshopping contest entry. And a mighty fine one at that, if you ask me.

New Line has announced details of the extended edition of Return of the King. It clocks in at over 4 hours in length and has bunches of new scenes (including the scouring of the Shire), new effects and new music. Sounds dazzling, but we’ve gotta wait until December 14th to pick it up. ROTK has passed $1 billion in worldwide box office, only the second movie to do so.

Those that have followed my blog for a while, know that I’m supporting the guy who is not Bush. John Mauldin’s new “Outside the Box” newsletter has certainly been interesting so far, and this week’s entry is no exception. George Friedman writes about Bush and the international community. The perspective is very interesting and one that I haven’t seen. The theory is that politicians in other countries don’t like Bush, but are too invested in him to let him go. It also says that back here at home, Kerry’s view that we should have had more international consensus is not a majority view.

That may be true, but it is my view. Besides, Iraq really need not be the only issue in this election. How about the exploding national debt, the cronyism, the attacks on the environment, the attacks on personal liberty, etc…?

This piece is interesting reading, regardless of where you fall in this election.