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Earth shaking news
Linux Journal's offices are in Fresh, beautiful mountain ranges, especially ones that include magnificent active volcanoes, are, to say the least, "seismically active." And, indeed, the Northwest has a record of big ones. But everybody seems to be overlooking the Big One that comes every three hundred years or so, and last happened on January 26, 1700. It probably measured 9.x on the Richter scale, and is dated by tsunami records kept by coastal towns in Japan. It explains ghost trees and other creepy phenomena. Puts these guys in a market for their work, too. A P2P fashion report
Don Marti I've been kinda dragging my butt about putting together some kind of report for Linux Journal on the O'Reilly P2P thing in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, partly because I'm still not clear enough about the whole phenomenon to bring some kind of overarching big-think sensibility to it. You know, like columnist types are supposed to do.
Don didn't have that problem. That's clear in his report on the event, titled Tim O'Reilly's Post-Apocalyptic Pants2Pants. Want some perspective? Here ya go:
The final layer of concrete in the containment structure over the vitrified capsule over the last nail in the coffin of the P2P business is, of course, what Professor Lawrence Lessig called the "weird exception to the First Amendment", the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sanctifies legal attacks on any technology of which large copyright-holding corporations do not approve, and enshrines any Digital Rights Management technology, even when it prevents legitimate use of DRM-infected content. "It's not the Framers' Constitution", Lessig said. "It's not even your father's Constitution." Courts, Lessig said, are upholding a new, dangerous legal right--any copyright-holding corporation can force developers of any new technology to architect their project to prevent copyright infringement from the start, whether or not they are left with a working system. Later Don describes his lessons as "a little post-apocalyptic." But hey. Don's a hacker. And as he says elsewhere in the piece, "the facts on the ground are that DMCA thugs are kicking hackers' doors down, not the other way around." Hard-knocking prose excepted, of course. Reality has been brought to you by...
Tom expands on yesterday's last item with Tellers, a piece of prose so brief and perfect it verges on poetry. A sample:
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wreckage
