Sunday, May 27, 2007

Intellectual property is at a crossroads, and proposals like this one in Japan don't help matters. Paying someone doesn't excuse the misapropriation of their property.
Digg Report: Today's #1 Digg, at 3167 Diggs, is a story about a man who is mistakenly attacked by a police dog and then by police officers as he struggled against all three. This is an unfortunate story, and does seem to indicate excessive force on the part of both the dog (who wouldn't know better) and the policemen (who should have).

Does it warrant such a high rating? Maybe, for those who pine for stories of police brutality.
On a related topic, I disagree with John Stossel on one point: poorer countries will not suffer more than richer countries from efforts to cut carbon emissions. First, they don't emit much carbon, because they're poor. Second, to the extent that they might actually suffer economically, they don't have as far to fall. And third, poorer economies tend to be far simpler, and thus don't suffer from economic upheaval the way that richer economies do with their incredibly intricate interconnectedness.

But, I don't mean to pick nits. Stossel is one of the few good mainstream reporters.
As well we should. The US has more to lose from these proposals than anyone else, not least because we'd likely be the only ones to stick to them. To be clear, the Daily Topic's position is that the issue is entirely politicized, anti-capitalist, and merely another in a long line of environmentalist attacks on mankind. It doesn't hurt to recognize, though, that as the world's most developed economy, America would suffer a far higher cost from such provisions than would less-developed countries (which would be the rest of the world).

Some might suppose that this is precisely the goal.
If you want to feel like you're constantly being baited (and, you are), then check out The Dilbert Blog, of course by Scott Adams.

For masochists only.
Here's a fairly in-depth, reasonable comparison between Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, if you're into that sort of thing. For me, Linux will only become a viable option when fixing something doesn't require dropping to the command line and when one can reasonably expect that all hardware components in a given machine will be supported.

So far, in my experimentation with Ubuntu 7.04, that's not yet the case. In fact, it's pretty far from it. Granted, I have some uncommon components in my Toshiba M400, the only machine I've yet tried with Ubuntu. However, I'm not talking about relative exotica like the digitizer, but rather relatively mundane things like dual-monitor support. And, don't get me started with wireless networking, where everything I could find about how to fix my issues with connecting to two different WAPs involved typing obscure commands at a command prompt.

Could I make Ubuntu work? Sure I could, if I wanted to spend the time learning those sorts of intricasies. And that's the point: I don't.