Shock of the Old

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Classic Sesame + Electric Co.

Say no to greedy assholes: Microsoft Free in '06

My sole New Year's resolution: stop picking my ears? Bike 100 miles a month? Stop eating crap? Figure out how to be a better father and/or husband?

Those are all too difficult. I am a realist. I am going 100% Microsoft free by June 1, 2006 (or 100%  minus the amount that Microsoft makes from the sale of Apple hardware). This shouldn't take six months, should it? I mean the open source tools have been out there for a while now, and I use a Mac anyway. . . I would like to do this without buying Keynote, too, I should add.

It's a transition that will take a little time. I've already downloaded and started using Neo Office. The text application is a piece of cake. Very MS-wordy interface. Exports to everything imaginable. Reads my word docs, even complex ones with funky characters and endnotes. But I need to get used to the quirks and differences. No sweat there. I produce like, 2 spreadsheets a year, and very basic ones at that; so the neo-office xl clone should do fine. It's ppt. that is the curse. I confess to using it in teaching. Students have come to expect it; it's a decent aid to memory when I'm trying to lecture, and they can be distributed electronically as a sort of lecture outline. (I'm also going to start podcasting my classes, but that's another fiasco waiting to happen). Neo Office has a presentation thing that works just like ppt, but doesn't export to ppt, only to image formats, PDF, and for some reason, .swf. So I may have to bite the bullet and keynote.
[All of this begs the question of whether or not to switch to openoffice.org, which requires X11 windows for OSX -- which I'm not at all sure how it works]

Why bitch, when, since I work in higher ed, I get all the MS office stuff for "free" (to me at least). I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with one of the aspects of the eightfold path: Right Livelihood. Act as though it matters that you withdraw your sanction from a monopolist corporation that has stifled innovation, and used its market dominance to foist the worst operating system ever invented on 98% of the PC market. And if I'm going to boycott the Dead, why stop there?

Bb + WCT = BFD

So I hear that Blackbeard and Web Shitee are merging?

To me this is rather like a merger between Clamato and V8. Result: it still tastes like ass.

9 people over the age of 55 decide the future of P2P

The Supreme Court will be deciding whether P2P is legal or not, and deciding the future of technical and digital culture evolution for perhaps the next decade, perhaps longer.

I wonder how many of the Justices know how to use a mouse. I wonder how many have ever looked up anything online deliberately, ever, or know how to search using google. I wonder how many have ever done anything other than tell their law clerks to buy plane tickets or gifts for their grandchildren online. I imagine some fawning law clerk showing Justice Rehnquist how to use Grokster or Limewire, and then telling him in all sincerity that these technologies are designed to undermine the property rights of those nice people at BMG/Universal and other media conglomerates. How will Eminem and Britney Spears ever make a living if we allow this to continue Mr. Chief Justice?

Can they fail to apply the standard of "substantial non-infringing use" in Sony vs. Universal (1984)? Of course they can. This is the court that told us that Bush v. Gore was an equal protection case.

gotta pith

A short but worthy article on the insufficiency of the theory and practice of the current regime of copyright law, and the general economic model of scarcity [note to self: bataille]regarding their (non) applicability to digital culture online at dominion paper dot ca.

Or as I am wont to pronounce in cocktail-party mode: applying print-era copyright law to digital culture is like applying maritime law to the interstate highways. (*thank you, thank you*)

free culture and 99 cent downloads

Someday, I hope, I will have time to develop the idea of the parallel between this cultural moment and others where the development of new media and expanded literacy, more efficient (re)production force a crisis of both freedom and interpretation.

Major points to be developed:

• Archbishop Arundel's 1409 Constitutions as the first copyright statute, in response to Lollard Englishing of the Bible.
• the extension of copyright ad absurdum into de facto perpetuity
• the medieval church monopoly on textual production and interpretation
• the contemporary culture oligopolies control of cultural production and consumption
• the equation of expanded lay literacy in the later middle ages with "heresy"
• the present day characterization by culture industries of anything that isn't pay-per-view/listen as "piracy"
• the DMCA as an attempt to clamp down on the changes in technology that allow "consumers" to become tinkerers, developers, hackers, and "creators."
• the disturbing trend of patenting software
• the restrictions on printing in early modern Europe.

Lessig's Free Culture is online as a creative commons license.