Code-Breakers Go to Court. Ed Felten, who did research for the Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation and decided to publish it (and to present the paper at a conference) rather than turn it over to the SDMI is suing the RIAA, the SDMI, and others. The SDMI folks said that they never intended to pursue legal action, but the plaintiffs say that’s not enough – they’re seeking precedent that privileges the First Amendment over the DMCA.
I’m in deep juggler mode
at the moment, which is a really fun spot to be in. In theory I’m looking for work as a product/project manager for a web concern or something like that. In fact, I haven’t been looking much – I’ve been waiting by the phone for an offer that I will take. And in the interim – I’m learning, playing, and developing projects at a fever pitch.
I’m doing a lot of playing around with CSS box-properties layouts, which has been good, if a little frustrating. As well, Aaron and Luke pretty much convinced me to roll my own tools to manage content for montrealstories.org (although an interim solution will be deployed sooner) – so I’m playing with XML, PHP and some other stuff to get that going. I have a bit of a background in scripting, though with a different kind of tool, so I’m feeling pretty confident.
As well, though, I’ve just now figured out the next project, which could be pretty neat. I’m not going to say more so I don’t jinx it, but it would be a different sort of thing, and terribly interesting to develop.
Bottom line: what I really need isn’t a job but a patron, sort of like a renaissance-era painter, or maybe a poet in Paris in the 20s. All that said, I am still excited about the job on the horizon too. It’ll just cut into my personal research time
Noted by boingboing
Noted by boingboing: some important new research is taking place at Harvard in the I Can Eat Glass Project. The goal of the project: to list how to say, “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” in as many different languages as possible. Warning: site features a truly horrifying bgimage.
I think many
people will be annoyed by the New Yorker’s article debunking the idea that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. It seems well enough researched though, and the Ada story always had a whiff of the fanciful around it.
Coming up on
World AIDS day this article on the high prices for AIDS drugs caught my eye. I’m not sure though. Generics cost less because those companies don’t spend much money at all on basic research, clinical trials, product education, etc. So to compare their prices with those charged by the big pharma companies isn’t exactly fair.
It can cost a company billions of dollars to bring any drug to market – whether it’s an AIDS drug or some other therapeutic agent. And generics companies don’t do any of that work – or very little. Maybe governments should be underwriting the drug costs?
