August 2007 Archives

You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of ‘live and let live.’ Maybe that sounded like a lot of words to you at home. Now you have a chance to prove it to yourself and others. If you can, it’s going to be a better world to live in for all of us.”…

It is a good idea in any foreign country to avoid any religious or political discussions. This is even truer in Iraq than most countries, because it happens that here the Moslems themselves are divided into two factions something like our division into Catholic and Protestant denominations—so don’t put in your two cents worth when Iraqis argue about religion. There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen.”

Scientists say two new skulls unearthed in Kenya challenge the conventional view of human evolution.  Instead of one human species evolving in succession after the other over the past two million years, the fossils reveal that two species at the dawn of human development evolved side by side.
...
According to the theory of evolution, there was a straight line in the development from our prehistoric ancestors to modern humans.

Twitter is an informational yard sale. You simply never know when that off-the-cuff comment you toss will alter a person's day. I'll explain via my two favorite use cases:

...The best example of this was a message I sent the last day of conference which read, "Drinks @ the W -- 4pm. I'm buying".

Three hours, thirteen attendees, and several hundred dollars later, I knew two things. First, who doesn't like free booze. Second, the definition of casual information varies wildly by who reads it. I would've happily drunk my margarita on the rocks solo at the W, which is why I threw my invite into Twitter, but it turns out twelve folks took my casual request and made it essential.

...My second Twitter use case involves keeping track of distant friends. ...I immediately started following him because I care what Brent thinks. Yeah, he's had a weblog forever, but the casual information relayed via Twitter is far more real. The act of creating casual information is a real-time slice of your life of the moment. I read messages in Twitter and think that people are giving themselves a headline or a title of a chapter of their lives. Here are the last three on my screen right now:

• Absorbing Jared's Hometown
• A Bit Early for the Cure
• The Wife's Margarita Recipe

Twitter gives me a glimpse into the lives of an interesting collection of people across the planet. It's casual information, but it's also a bit of poetry and it's all better than radio silence. I'd prefer to be drinking with y'all, but I'll take what I can get.

What I discovered is that if you first double-tap on a column (like those found on many news pages or standard web pages), the screen will zoom in to fit the whole column (that part, most people probably already know). From that point, though, you can double-tap in the lower ¼ of the screen to scroll down a nice amount for reading. Double-tapping in the upper ¼ of the screen will scroll up.

Should ordinary Americans face jail time for attempted copyright infringement? Should the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts also threaten P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists? Of course not, but the Department of Justice (DoJ) has drafted an outrageous legislative proposal that applies these severe penalties and much more. A related bill, H.R. 3155, has already been introduced in Congress -- take action now to stop it using the form below.

Criminal copyright infringement already goes beyond situations involving large-scale commercial piracy. Thanks to laws like the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act and the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (FECA), the federal government can now criminally charge (i.e., send to prison) people for simply uploading a single "pre-release" song (as two Ryan Adams fans discovered last year when they were brought up on federal charges for uploading tracks from pre-release promotional CDs).

Most of the DoJ's proposed changes to copyright's criminal provisions fall into two categories: (1) making it easier to convict people by eliminating the inconvenient necessity of proving that actual infringement took place, and (2) increasing the financial and confinement punishments. Law enforcement would also be allowed to use wiretaps and to spy on personal communications as part of copyright investigations. That potentially translates into wiretap authority for millions of American homes, since surveys show that 1 in 5 American Internet users downloads music and movies from P2P networks.