How to solve Sudoku

Just login as root and type 'ku'.

Hint for the less geeky.

Explanation for the non-geeky.

How to really solve Sudoku.

Technorati Tags: geeky, Python, sudoku

Gowers' biased rhetoric

The Gowers Review of Intellectual property released a final report today. The Open Rights Group has a good response on the overall impact, but I noticed some rhetorical bias. Paragraph 1.9 of the report says:

1.9 Achieving this balance is made more difficult by the vocabulary used to discuss IP policy and practice. Copyright infringement through unauthorised copying and distribution of music and video across the Internet is likened to stealing by some, and to sharing by others. Those who seek to prevent others from using a patented invention without permission are branded ‘trolls’*. Those who copy and distribute material illegally are called ‘pirates’. And the problem of ‘orphan’ works, which arises where copyright owners are untraceable, perhaps provokes an easy sympathy.

Having made this point though, the rest of the review uses 'piracy' throughout in phrases like 'strengthening enforcement of IP rights, whether through clamping down on piracy or trade in counterfeit goods', and does not mention patent trolling at all. Down in the glossary at the end, the report defines:

Piracy: Unauthorised duplication of goods protected by IP law

By using this rhetorical trick, Gowers continually makes an equivalence between commercial counterfeiting of CDs on a large scale with the copying inherent and necessary in any use of digital media. Gowers also makes some bizarre leaps of logic:

1.4 Ideas are expensive to produce but cheap to copy. The fixed costs of producing knowledge are high. Hollywood blockbusters can costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make[...]

How much knowledge does a Hollywood blockbuster contain, compared to, say, the Wikipedia page on intellectual property? The fixed costs there are remarkably low. The costs of production are continually plummeting, thanks to digital technologies, and that enables commons-based peer production, like Wikipedia. Some of Gowers recommendations are good, but it looks like he didn't engage with Benkler's Wealth of Networks thesis on new kinds of knowledge creation.

*Patent trolling is when a patent is used to prevent innovation by blackmailing companies with a patent, often second-hand. I've written on patent trolls before.

At Internet Identity Workshop

December 4th — 6th, 2006 Internet Identity Workshop— at Computer History Museum

I'm at the Internet Identity Workshop today, talking about Microformats.

Paradise regained?

Nick Carr characteristically sees doom in Second Life's copybot, via Alex Krotoski:

Krotoski saw, in the reaction of the new merchant class, that something more than his little laboratory had disappeared from the virtual world:

And so, once again, the real world comes crashing in. Sooner or later, most online communities reach this crisis point because the ideals of the founders are replaced by regulations demanded by the different types of people who interact in them. We shouldn't be surprised; what we do when we interact online is replicate the social practices we are familiar with offline. Inspired by this milestone, I'm going to add a wing to my new lab. And inside will be a shrine to CopyBot, the little hack that transformed Second Life into a real world.

Lay a virtual rose on the shrine for me, Aleks.

Now, I've quoted Macaulay on this before, but his clarity of thought is hard to resist on Milton:

If, Sir, I wished to find a strong and perfect illustration of the effects which I anticipate from long copyright, I should select,—my honourable and learned friend will be surprised,—I should select the case of Milton's granddaughter. As often as this bill has been under discussion, the fate of Milton's granddaughter has been brought forward by the advocates of monopoly. My honourable and learned friend has repeatedly told the story with great eloquence and effect. He has dilated on the sufferings, on the abject poverty, of this ill-fated woman, the last of an illustrious race. He tells us that, in the extremity of her distress, Garrick gave her a benefit, that Johnson wrote a prologue, and that the public contributed some hundreds of pounds. Was it fit, he asks, that she should receive, in this eleemosynary form, a small portion of what was in truth a debt? Why, he asks, instead of obtaining a pittance from charity, did she not live in comfort and luxury on the proceeds of the sale of her ancestor's works? But, Sir, will my honourable and learned friend tell me that this event, which he has so often and so pathetically described, was caused by the shortness of the term of copyright? Why, at that time, the duration of copyright was longer than even he, at present, proposes to make it. The monopoly lasted, not sixty years, but for ever. At the time at which Milton's granddaughter asked charity, Milton's works were the exclusive property of a bookseller. Within a few months of the day on which the benefit was given at Garrick's theatre, the holder of the copyright of Paradise Lost,—I think it was Tonson,—applied to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against a bookseller who had published a cheap edition of the great epic poem, and obtained the injunction. The representation of Comus was, if I remember rightly, in 1750; the injunction in 1752. Here, then, is a perfect illustration of the effect of long copyright. Milton's works are the property of a single publisher. Everybody who wants them must buy them at Tonson's shop, and at Tonson's price. Whoever attempts to undersell Tonson is harassed with legal proceedings. Thousands who would gladly possess a copy of Paradise Lost, must forego that great enjoyment. And what, in the meantime, is the situation of the only person for whom we can suppose that the author, protected at such a cost to the public, was at all interested? She is reduced to utter destitution. Milton's works are under a monopoly. Milton's granddaughter is starving. The reader is pillaged; but the writer's family is not enriched. Society is taxed doubly. It has to give an exorbitant price for the poems; and it has at the same time to give alms to the only surviving descendant of the poet.

we can change society's rules, and we do it by experimenting near the edges

Technorati Tags: copyright

Thanksgiving meat

Bill explains how to turn Turkeys into meat. But then, aren't we all made out of meat?

Update: OMG turkeys!

Technorati Tags: meat, thanksgiving, turkey

AI pipedreams now called Web 3.0

John Markoff's Web 3.0 piece was an odd conflation of various kinds of "if only the world were a simpler place" AI dreams, actually triggering a full 10⁶ microLenats on the bogometer. I wouldn't have commented on this, except that my copy of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream came today, and I read this passage that summed it up well:

In the end, however, it was not capability that limited the potential of artificial intelligence, it was hubris. Intelligence programmers almost by definition have a God complex, which means they don't like following anyone else's work, including that of nature. In conversation, intelligence programmers will speak warmly about the giants of the field that have come before them and express reverential awe regarding the evolutionary processes that time and again have spawned intelligence from non-sentience. In their heads, however, they regard the earlier programmers as hacks who went after low-hanging fruit and evolution as the long way of going about things.

It is exactly this tendency, as observed in ourselves and others, that led to the observe, document, simplify, then converge approach set out in the Microformats process.

Technorati Tags: bogosity, meme, microformat, microformats, web 2.0

My blog's fifth birthday

I saw danah's call for help with her timeline of social software, and remembered Chris Locke talking about sixdegrees.com on his EGR mailing list. There, I saw the email from Chris that started me blogging, 5 years ago today.

Looks like I posted 4 times that day, on memetic engineering, Geoffrey Nunberg distorting Samuel Johnson by selective quoting, Chris Locke on Johnson, and tracing over pictures.

I saw Denise Howell at the Web 2.0 summit yesterday, and she reminded me we both responded to the same call.

Blair's Modern World

In the Telegraph, Tony Blair writes about the 'need' for ID cards

The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world [...] I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don't think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.

I think I've heard this before - The Jam, in 1977

This is the modern world that I've learnt about
This is the modern world, we don't need no one
To tell us what's right or wrong -
Say what you like cause I don't care
I know where I am and going too
It's somewhere I won't preview
Don't have to explain myself to you
I don't give two fucks about your review

If Blair is explictly pitting modernity against liberty, Evelyn Waugh's closing of Scott-Kings' Modern Europe seems apposite: "I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."

Technorati Tags: Blair, liberty, modern, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, UK, Waugh

Mike Ford's Occasional Works at Making Light

The Making Light blog is collecting Mike Ford's comments there as a series:

De vermis.

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

This modern commonplace book is continually inspiring and amusing. I never met Mike Ford, but read enough of his words at Making Light to miss him now.

Technorati Tags: auctorial, philosophy, words, writing

Hollywood, software and the net

JP made an analogy between software development and film-making:

Only successful scripts should get financed

That’s what angels want first and foremost. Good scripts. Because they know that they can get good producers, good directors, good actors, good everything. But good scripts are harder to come by.

BTW, have you ever wondered why angel investors exist in only two investment genres, filmmaking and software development? Now you know.

Now JP does mention development hell, which was best described by Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman:

Whedon: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

Gaiman: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

Tonight at the Vloggies, Jerry Zucker (who built his career on satirising movie clichés) spoke of the opportunity to avoid the mess of Hollywood:

We were just experimenting, we were playing, we were having fun with this whole new field... We had to build a theatre with 150 seats to bring people in to watch it. What you have today is the possibility to take this stuff and send it around the world, for nothing. It is going to change the way we view entertainment. The studios in Hollywood are already a mess - this is going to change entertainment, and you are all at the beginning of it, so good luck and god bless

I think JP and JZ are both thinking about the same thing as I spoke about last week, where the internet undoes the need to pitch a story to fiscal gatekeepers, instead enabling anyone to speak in public, and for us all to decide who to listen to. This brought to mind a stanza from the Faithless song 'Not Enuff Love':

Whoever asks my name
Or where I came from
People fear contamination
If they tarry too long
I carry a strong
Sin of despair
It's in the air
I'm broken and hard to repair
I may mistaken be
But I patiently wait
On the path to humanity
I sit at the gates

Here's to forcing open the gates, and keeping them wide open.

Technorati Tags: Hollywood, software, podcasting, VC, Venture Capital, video, vloggies

Don't use Wells Fargo as your bank

Their online banking seems attractive, but it has a fatal flaw.

It doesn't show a running balance with each transaction, just a mythical 'available balance', and a long list of 'pending' transactions. The trouble is, the pending transactions become actual at different times. In particular, any debits become actual before any credits. So, if you have a large pending deposit of, say, your salary, a few small transactions that come through first can take you overdrawn. Wells Fargo will then charge you $33 per transaction for these overdraft transactions. The $33 doesn't pend at all, it just disappears from your account into their profits, along with all the interest they are earning on 'pending' your deposits.

As I said, avoid Wells Fargo banking.

Technorati Tags: banking, ethics, extortion, Wells Fargo

Microformats for Halloween

Microformat logo pumpkin
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

I was wondering what to carve into the pumpkin, and a vision of orange came to me. The orange Microformats logo, as seen on Pingerati.

Technorati Tags: halloween, logo, microformat, microformats, pumpkin, web 2.0

Truth in Comedy

Armando Iannucci explains that comedy is making the serious points in politics:

I still want comedy to matter a great deal. I want it to tackle big subjects. The idea that we are making someone laugh about something does not mean we don't take it seriously. Sometimes, we can take something so seriously that the only practical way to release the tension is to make a joke. Sometimes, we can be so appalled by someone's behaviour that the only effective way to run it again in our heads is as farce. Luckily, we do not live under tyranny, but those who do so know the creative freedom the joke gives them. You can ban writing, but you can't stop people finding things funny.

Bill Amend illustrates the point:

Technorati Tags: cartoon, comedy, funny, politics, voting

Vote for Andrew and Christopher in the vloggies

My boys' blog is up for voting in the vloggies in the "children's" category. To encourage you to vote we have put up a video they made about 5 years ago called Christopher's Buttons, when Christopher invented some magic buttons, and they started working.

Here's the full, Director's Cut edition, and here's a short version on YouTube:

Do please vote for the boys.

Technorati Tags: button, funny, magic, marksbrothers, podcasting, video, vloggies, YouTube

Made with more love than money

Reading Ev's post about buying back Odeo from the VC's and refocusing on smaller faster development, along with Aaron's on how Google could decentralise I see several trends converging.

Software startups used to need lots of VC cash and time because of the old packaged software cycle, where you had big, annual releases that you sold for hundreds of dollars apiece. On the web, we have daily releases, adapting to customers and other changes in the environment, and new tools mean that an 18-year-old with an idea can get it up and running fast, then worry about scale.

Talking to various friends working in the field I am starting to see a pattern. With the trend of startup funding and team size shrinking so much, we'll end up with several startups each - a kind of personal portfolio theory - lots of small ideas, made because we can, some of which will blossom.

Update: Fred Wilson calls this being a Parallel Entrepreneur. That makes some sense, after all 'entrepreneur' means 'carrier between' - it's all about connecting ideas.

Technorati Tags: economics, emergence, power law, software, VC, Venture Capital, web 2.0, Web 2.0℠