Archive for February, 2007

cory doctorow to visit unc…

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Reposting from just about everywhere:

What: Pwned: How copyright turns us all into IP serfs
Who: Cory Doctorow

Quick on Cory: Boingboing editor, EFF, SciFi Writer, Disney-obsessed
Copyfighter, Fulbright Chair at Annenberg UCSD

When: 2 pm Thursday February 22nd (aka 2/22 at 2)

Where: Wilson Library
http://www.lib.unc.edu/wilson/directions.html
UNC-Chapel Hilll

Sponsors: ibiblio.org, UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Free Culture Carolina, School of Information and Library Science

Cory’s previous trip to UNC:
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/speakers/doctorow/

More about Cory:

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In that capacity, he worked to balance international treaties, polices and standards on copyright and related rights, advocating in the halls of governments, the United Nations, standards bodies, corporations, universities and non-profit. Presently, he serves as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. His novels are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, Stikkit, Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, SiteShuffle, and Onion Networks, Inc. His latest novel is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow

Cory will also be speaking at Duke as part of the Provost Lecture Series http://www.provost.duke.edu/speaker_series/current_speakers.html “From Myspace to Homeland Security: Privacy and the Totalitarian Urge”
5:00 p.m. - Love Auditorium, Levine Science Research Center

I should also note that I made a flyer for this event:

cory doctorow flyer

Clicky the pic for a big version. Feel free to share it with others. You can find a few more formats here.

comedy…

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Paul Jones informs me, as he often does, of something awesome going on in Carolina this week - The 2007 Carolina Comedy Festival which culminates with Lewis Black performing at Memorial Hall on Saturday. Lots of cool stuff including several lectures, talks, and workshops about the art of comedy.

get rid of DRM…

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

I would have posted this sooner, but my Internet connection has been spotty. I haven’t spent a lot of time on campus lately so I can continue to recover from the itis. At the same time, Time Warner cut off my cable too early at my old apartment. Therefore, I’m pretty much without the net until Friday when they come to the new house and turn it on.

Anyway, Steve Jobs wrote up a piece about how the music industry needs to get rid of DRM. This pretty much confirms something I’ve always expected, that companies like Apple and Microsoft would just as soon have zero DRM if the various industries would allow them too. We spend a lot of time cursing the software and hardware makers for implementing DRM and we should probably continue to do so, but we should realize that they wouldn’t be able to sell all this music and movies at all without submitting something to the industries.

It’s nice to see Jobs challenging this a little bit and I hope other software makers (Bill?) do the same and perhaps we can finally get total control of our entertainment again.

mono tales…

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

So for the past couple of weeks I’ve had a mono-like illness. That is, I’m testing negative for mono, but I still have all the symptoms of mono. I don’t know what that means either.

Mono, if you’ve never had it, is a little bitch. It straps you to the bed for several weeks and then right when you start feeling better it likes to trick you. You’ll wake up one morning and feel pretty okay. Slightly light-headed perhaps, but nothing compared to the crap that’s kept you in bed for the past couple of weeks. So you start thinking, I can get back to doing what I normally do. So you get up, hesitantly at first just to make sure you can walk around without having to sit down. That works out just fine, so you try to do something, like going to class. It’s rough but you survive even though you feel like you can’t quite keep up with the lesson.

Slowly, you feel a little better everyday. You seem to be able to sustain your energy for longer periods. You can do things like eat and you sleep all night without much trouble. You start having multiple days in a row where you really don’t feel all that bad. So then you decide, “Well, dammit, I’m better! I got stuff to do! Let me start moving some boxes. I’m buying a house this weekend!”

And mono just laughs at you a half hour later, when you’re laid out on the bed again too tired to move.

I hate you Epstein-Barr virus.

Which way…

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

My good friend Allen had the good fortune to have his really old, really demented flash game linked from both Kotaku and Game|Life. It’s a lot like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books of days past, except here you’re likely to be eaten by a manticore… or take down capitalism. Enjoy the Which-Way Adventure.