Monthly Archives: December 2002

Reissue Wishlist

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On NPR this morning, I caught the second installment of four in their CD Wishlist series. Each week they invite three people to talk about beloved music recordings which have never been reissued on CD. NPR.org has a page where you can listen to the interviews and segments of the music with RealPlayer.

Police State

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2600 reports:

An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver – for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing. Maginnis told his story on Wednesday’s edition of Off The Hook.
…and later in the same story…
After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was allowed to make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the Denver Post and asked for the news desk. This was immediately overheard by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a holding cell.
Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with no explanation. He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his confiscated possessions. He was told that he would probably not get his camera back, as it was being held as evidence.
Maginnis’s lawyer contacted the Denver Police Department for an explanation of the day’s events, but the police denied ever having Maginnis – or anyone matching his description – in custody. At press time, the Denver PD’s Press Information Office did not return telephone messages left by 2600.
source: “PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES OF VICE PRESIDENT’S HOTEL”, 2600 News

Skeevy blog reaches tipping point, causes collateral damage

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary Newsletter, their North American Editorial Unit has got some gems for an upcoming edition:
Some of the words we have drafted in recent months include tipping point, gentleman’s C, weaponize, collateral damage, blog, skeevy, and perp walk.
source: “The OED’s North American Editorial Unit”, Oxford English Dictionary News, June 2002

Sneak Peek at Java 1.5 features

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Today the Java Community Process
announced JSR 201, “Extending the JavaTM Programming Language with…”. Draft specs for enumerations, autoboxing, enhanced for loop, static import are being made available concurrently with the release of this JSR.
That enhanced for loop looks handy. Since I originally posted this, I see James Strachan’s excellent (if unlikely to be heeded) suggestion that Sun develop a compiler which can emit bytecode which runs on any Java 2 runtime, so that developers can use these features whether or not users have upgraded. Since J2SE 1.4 is apparently having a slow uptake, that seems like a good idea…

Smarter Contacts

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As I’m doing some cleanup in my electronic address book, I’m wondering if anyone has gotten this right yet. I use Palm Desktop (even though I haven’t used a Palm PDA for more than a year), because ultimately, it’s a pretty good application. However, it’s a little irritating that it considers addresses as dependent properties of humans. After all, I know several families where I have an entry for each person in my contacts, either so I can track their separate birthdays, cell phone numbers, or work addresses. But they all share the same home address; do any contact managers out there handle the possible many-to-many relationships between humans and mailing addresses more normally? Similarly, while I don’t need to keep a lot of professional contacts’ mailing addresses, I should logically be able to link several people to a single office.
As a software developer, I understand that this is more complicated to implement, and more significantly, it might be too complicated for many users to understand readily. Still, I’m curious if there are consumer address book applications which handle contact data in such a normalized fashion.
I should note that the Palm Desktop application for Macintosh is a pretty nifty PIM application; Palm bought it instead of building it from scratch, so it’s much more full-featured than the Windows version (last I checked). I don’t use it as completely as I did when I had a Palm, but I still think it’s pretty good.

Legorama

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Blogdex led me to Lego Death; it reminded me of
The Brick Testament. Lego Death gets points for
creativity, although the flash interface is a little overkill. I like the last one (“It’s Probably the Wind”) under the “Domestic Incidents” category. Personally,
I prefer the Brick Testament for the level of detail in its scenes, but both are good for some fun.

Brave Net World

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Spotted on Rael Dornfest’s blog:

This brings to mind a wish that occurred to me as I waited for a BART train in San Francisco. Privacy issues aside, I’d love for my Bluetooth-enabled Sony-Ericsson cellphone to meander the ether consulting the contacts databases of similarly untethered devices in the vicinity.

Cast a net for a set of personal UUIDs (read: telephone numbers). Notify me if anyone within tooth-shot has more than a specified threshhold [sic] of n contacts in common. Offer to broker an introduction.

Promoting Innovation?

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They say that copyright and intellectual property laws are intended to promote innovation. Lawrence Lessig comments on an interesting personal email:
Jason Schultz has done more amazing work calculating any “chaos” that would come from striking the 1976 Act. Using the Internet Movie Database, he confirmed the Copyright Office’s numbers that about 37,000 movies were released in the period 1927-46. (IMDb reports 36,386). Of those, only 2,480 are currently available in any formay [sic], or 6.8%. 93.2% of the films during that period are are commercially dormant. Another way to put this: Jack Valenti’s crowd says exclusive rights are the only way to assure content get’s [sic] distributed. So we have a nice experiment: For the films between 1927-46, exclusive rights fails to make available 93.2% of the content produced. Does anyone really doubt the public domain wouldn’t do better?
Certainly, reissuing out-of-print films (or other media) isn’t innovation, as such, but still…

News Flash: People Prefer Free

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The Mercury News reports that industry-supported for-fee digital music services are not doing too well.
Earlier, I noted that PressPlay and MusicNet, the two major services, had reached a cross-licensing agreement, but presumably this study predates any possible effects of that arrangement. However, the Merc article indicates that there are more obstacles — some big players like the Beatles and the Stones won’t allow anyone to use their music in this way, and some pretty popular artists are still on big independent labels that don’t participate in that agreement. (They cite Alicia Keys and Michelle Branch; woefully out of touch, I have no idea who either of them are…)
It’s interesting to note the monoliths of music aren’t willing to give the music industry its cut. The owners of the rights to the music of groups like the Beatles can easily afford to wait this out a little longer; especially because they have a lot less current expenses than record labels do.
The article also trots out the “Perrier” analogy, that people will pay for things they could get free if it’s marketed correctly. But I have trouble imagining the marketing strategy that trumps free music downloading.