Scoble is playing with a NEC Tablet computer. “This thing might ruin your marriage.” Thanks to Dave Winer for reminding us that Scoble works for NEC, but even so he makes one very good point — namely that unless Apple gets an OS X tablet out there soon, the company might lose its stranglehold on the graphics-design community. [Scripting News]

Variation on a theme of Lessig: no. 1

“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

T.S. Eliot, “Massinger”, in The Sacred Wood

Creative Commons. About a week ago, Creative Commons launched the first version of their licensing project.

It’s a well-designed site. They explain the licences clearly in non-legal jargon and have a form where you can say what you want to do with your work and they suggest the appropriate licence.

I’ll be adopting one of their licences for everything on this site in the near future. [Status-Q: Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s notepad]

The new new firm: Bush, Poindexter and Orwell

“The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, “The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks”.[More]

Someone’s selling a town on eBay

“NYT” story. Asking price: $775,000. It’s in California, natch. Wonder if I could apply for the post of Sherrif? Update December 27: It was sold for $1.8 million.

Microsoft loses Java round to Sun
“NYT” story.

“A federal judge ruled yesterday that Microsoft must include the Java programming language of Sun Microsystems with the Windows operating system, handing Sun a victory in its private antitrust case.

In granting a preliminary injunction sought by Sun, the judge forced Microsoft to confront what would be perhaps the most intrusive penalty yet to stem from court rulings that it broke federal antitrust laws.

The judge, J. Frederick Motz of Federal District Court in Baltimore, also indicated that he would order Microsoft to stop shipping a version of Java that Sun contends damages the chances of its own version because it is outdated and creates confusion among programmers about which one to use for developing software….”.

More shattered illusions

As an impressionable lad in the 1950s, I was fascinated by The Lone Ranger comic strip in which a cowboy (TLR) and his trusty Indian companion, Tonto, performed heroic deeds. The only phrase Tonto ever uttered in the course of his duties was ‘Kemo Sabay’, which I naturally assumed was Indian for ‘yes boss’. Now cynics tell me it means ‘Horse’s Ass’. There was also that scene in which TLR and Tonto are besieged by marauding Indians dressed to kill and whooping like mad. “Looks like we’re surrounded, Tonto”, says the hero. “Whaddya mean ‘we’, paleface”, replies Tonto.

ElcomSoft acquitted: DMCA not quite as effective as planned
“NYT” story.

“Dec. 17 [~] In the first criminal court test of a law intended to prevent digital piracy, a federal jury today acquitted a Russian company accused of illegally selling software that permitted users to circumvent security features in an electronic book.

The case, which was tried in San Jose, centered on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a technology-era update to copyright law. The act has engendered deep criticism from some legal experts who say it goes too far in protecting copyrights and, in turn, stifles innovation. Today, some of those critics hailed the jury’s decision as a sign that the government must choose its cases more judiciously…”

Scott Rosenberg on the Supernova conference

Typically thoughtful piece by Scott on the Supernova conference. “Conference organizer Kevin Werbach admitted that his “decentralization” label was “ugly,” but suggested that its very awkwardness was a sign that we were dealing with an underlying trend rather than a “marketing-concocted theme.” And he was right: The phenomena this event focused on, a grab bag of new technologies that have bubbled up from the humbled high-tech world in the post-crash era, are mostly geek driven and grassroots spread: Wi-Fi (802.11b), the wireless high-speed Net access method; blogs; and “Web services,” a fuzzy term to describe new methods of directly and quickly connecting software applications and data across the Net.

These disparate boomlets share an “end to end” design: They rely on the power of individual users’ computers — there’s no big, centrally operated piece of software or hardware mediating. The users connect across an open, “stupid” network — the Internet itself, today — that simply moves information without worrying about what it is. The resulting software is ad hoc, impromptu, flexible, “lightweight.” Empowered individuals at the ends of the network try out new ideas and build myriad new services. It’s geek heaven.”

Unfortunately — or fortunately? — there don’t seem to be many business models promising huge fortunes from this. Rosenberg goes on:

“By any rational view, the decentralized technology world Supernova envisioned is one in which small operators can make a living, but nobody is going to make a killing.

That sounds all right to me. But it doesn’t mean the venture capital money will stay away. (Talk about “stupid networks”!) There are alarming indications here and there that some of the technologies championed at Supernova are already heading down the same path that the Web itself traveled in the mid-’90s — as investors began to pile in, claiming market share today and putting off till tomorrow figuring out how to earn money. Cometa, the Wi-Fi provider that plans to sell a nationwide network as a wholesaler to ISPs, is one venture whose recent launch certainly had a “build first, improvise a revenue model later” feeling.

Should the geeks care? After all, the Web got built, even if the landscape is littered with defunct Web companies. If investors throw money at good technologies, does it matter whether the companies that are the money’s conduit flame out?

I think it does. When a technology begins small and has time to evolve, find its uses and build a following, it has staying power. (Look at the Net itself, whose protocols were two decades old before it became popular. Or look at how Linux, which had spent most of a decade emerging, was able to survive the hurricane of an infatuated Wall Street that swept over it two years ago and then abandoned it just as fast.)

The danger here is that the dynamo of the Silicon Valley boom-bust cycle, in its hunger for Next Big Thing fuel, will seize upon Wi-Fi, blogs and Web services and then spit them out, chewed-up and spent — before they’ve ever had a chance to mature and show off their potential. ”

How Google does its stuff

Useful academic background on PageRank.