senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter

changing of the seasons

the art of balance

• ip idiocy link of the day: james boyle comments on the fanatical efforts of WIPO to enact a new treaty dealing with ip issues related to broadcasting and webcasting

  First and most lamentably, 
  intellectual property laws are 
  created without any empirical 
  evidence that they are necessary 
  or that they will help rather 
  than hurt.  Second, the 
  policymaking process has failed 
  to keep track of the increasing 
  importance of intellectual 
  property rights to everything 
  from freedom of expression and 
  communications policy to economic 
  development or access to 
  educational materials.  
  
  We still make law as though it 
  were just a deal brokered between 
  industry groups – balancing the 
  interests of content companies 
  with those of broadcasters, for 
  example.  The public interest in 
  competition, access, free speech 
  and vigorous technological markets 
  takes a back seat.  What matters 
  is making the big boys happy. 
  Finally, communications networks 
  are increasingly built around 
  intellectual property rules, as 
  law regulates technology more and 
  more directly; not always to good 
  effect. 
  

high-speed hijinks

• what are some of the causes of climate change ?
  ANS: human industrial development, volcanoes, the water cycle, historical weather patterns;
• do you think that anything you do personally will affect climate change ?
  ANS: nope. only international co-ordination will have any effect, and even then will merely moderate the rate of change rather than reverse it

• which of the following vehicles do you drive - car, truck, SUV, boat, etc. ?
  ANS: none of the above (was not even included as an option)
• would you consider purchasing compact fluorescent light bulbs that fit into standard fixtures ?
  ANS: i would if any stores in town actually stocked them !

• ip link of the day: jonathan band's copyright analysis of the googleprint project.
  
  band posits that the leading decision that considered the fair use issues relating to search engine operations is Kelly v. Arriba Soft, 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003). in that decision, the court analyzed 4 'fair use' factors to determine whether the image search engine violated copyright by copying images and making thumbnail versions available to web searchers. the court ruled the use by Arriba Soft would tend to drive web users to Kelly's site rather than away from it.
  
  in a similar fashion, the googleprint project would tend to drive web users towards the publishers and copyright owners of the library materials being scanned, rather than taking them elsewhere. thus, under u.s. law anyway, if the Arriba precedent is followed, the googleprint project would fall under the fair use provisions of the copyright act and would not be considered a violation of copyright.

driving back and forth

• link of the day: the only way to change driving behaviour is to apply economic principles:

  It's not just that we choose to 
  drive a lot. We make residential 
  and other lifestyle decisions 
  based on an artificially low cost 
  of driving.  When someone buys a 
  big-ass house 62 miles from work 
  and nowhere near public transit, 
  they just assume that they can 
  commute every day on a free or 
  cheap road at 8:30 a.m.  The 
  reality is that for society at 
  large, that 124-mile round trip 
  commute is anything but free or 
  cheap.
  
  ...
  
  If you raise the price of 
  something, people use less of it. 
  So congestion pricing has 
  predictable effects: It will move
  some drivers to off-peak hours, 
  when tolls are lower; it will 
  encourage carpooling and public 
  transit; and in the long run, it 
  will encourage people to live in 
  places where they have to drive 
  less (and perhaps inspire 
  businesses to make smarter 
  location decisions).
  
  And remember, if we raise 
  additional revenue by making it 
  more expensive to drive, there is 
  no reason we can't cut taxes on 
  something else that we would like 
  to encourage -- like working.
  

doesn't seem like work if you're having fun

• link of the day: paul graham outlines what business can learn from blogging and open source

  I suspect professionalism was always
  overrated - not just in the literal
  sense of working for money, but also
  connotations like formality and  
  detachment.  Inconceivable as it 
  would have seemed in, say, 1970, I 
  think professionalism was largely a
  fashion, driven by conditions that
  happened to exist in the twentieth
  century.
  
  ...
  
  Those in the print media who dismiss
  the writing online because of its low
  average quality are missing an 
  important point: no one reads the
  average blog.  ... you can read 
  any writer you want.  So the average 
  quality of writing online isn't what 
  print media are competing against.  
  They're competing against the best
  writing online.
  
  ...
  
  Another thing blogs and open source
  software have in common is that 
  they're often made by people working
  at home.  That may not seem surprising.
  But it should be.  It's the 
  architectural equivalent of a home-made
  aircraft shooting down an F-18.
  
  ...
  
  Ironically, though open source and blogs 
  are done for free, those worlds resemble
  market economies, while most companies,
  for all their talk about the value of
  free markets, are run internally like
  communist states.
  
  ...
  
  So these, I think, are the three big 
  lessons open source and blogging have
  to teach business: 
  
  (1) that people work harder on stuff 
  they like,
  
  (2) that the standard office environment 
  is very unproductive, and
  
  (3) that bottom-up often works better 
  than top-down.
  

friday revelations

happiness is *not* a sore back

• happiness as a subject of academic study:

  Survival in a time of adversity 
  forged our brains into a 
  persistent mould.  Professor 
  Seligman says: "Because our brain 
  evolved during a time of ice, 
  flood and famine, we have a 
  catastrophic brain.  The way the 
  brain works is looking for what's 
  wrong. The problem is, that worked 
  in the Pleistocene era. It favoured 
  you, but it doesn't work in the 
  modern world."
  
  Although most people rate themselves 
  as happy, there is a wealth of 
  evidence to show that negative 
  thinking is deeply ingrained in the
  human psyche.  Experiments show that 
  we remember failures more vividly 
  than successes.  We dwell on what 
  went badly, not what went well. 
  When life runs smoothly, we're on
  autopilot — we're only in a state of 
  true consciousness when we notice the 
  stone in our shoe.
  
  ...
  
  At the Royal Institution, Nettle 
  explained how brain chemistry foils 
  our pursuit of happiness in the 
  modern world: "The things that you 
  desire are not the things that you 
  end up liking. The mechanisms of 
  desire are insatiable. There are 
  things that we really like and tire 
  of less quickly — having good friends, 
  the beauty of the natural world, 
  spirituality.  But our economic 
  system plays into the psychology of 
  wanting, and the psychology of liking 
  gets drowned out."