i on the other hand feel that copying digital material is an absolute moral imperative.
this begs the question: when is copying ok and when is it not (forgetting the ‘law’ for a moment)?
but is any answer to that question even meaningful?
technology has created a situation where there is one communal respository (or library) of digital content, and you can check items out without ever paying a fee, without depriving the ‘library’ of revenue, and without depleting the availability of the content.
In fact, your checking the content out actually means more people can have access to that content. suddenly the moral coin has flipped!
telling me copying a song or a movie is wrong would be like telling me that going to my library and copying a book is morally wrong.
i want to say that the movie industry should plan against revenue from after market DVD sales, but it occurs to me that there is something about a movie that makes me (and presumably others) want to buy and collect them. and a movie in a fancy movie box is a lot nicer than a burned DVD.
then again i probably think this only because of limitations of storage and bandwidth. If I could store 10 or 100 DVD-quality movies on my laptop, (and if i had a much improved battery) perhaps i would think differently about the collection argument and not care so much about fancy cases.
i do think it’s true that if I had limitless access to a gazillion HDTV/DVD-quality movies on-demand for some low monthly flat rate, I probably wouldn’t care so much about downloading it for free or needing to store a copy locally.
judging by the acclaim of HBO lately, I’d wager that their business model(s) are closer to the future. films released for the cinemas that cost $80-100mil to make probably say more about the excesses and cost-inefficiencies of hollywood and the necessity of imposing draconian and anti-consumer copy-protections.
I’m not sure this is such a good idea. I mean, I’m sure Evan Williams and Pyra and the blogging community think it rocks, but is this really smart for Google or blogging in general?
We don’t want Google becoming Microsoft II, do we? At least we can hope Google will have a bit more scruples.
I think it’d be much smarter for google to create some sort of blog specific searching or content aggregation (a la Google News, blogdex, technorati, etc) rather than absorb Pyra.
This smacks of AOL absorbing Netscape. Though Mozilla survived, Netscape is now a sad brand without a soul.
apparently my system board was fried and the hard drive is aok. so strange! this is good, cause there was *1* file on there that I didn’t have a copy of anywhere else. so the guy has replaced the board and I should be getting back my baby before the week is out. *grin*
first let me mention that I had a lovely dinner with melanie, pj, and jackie tonight. we broiled salmon with lemon, garlic, and rosemary, we half fried/half sauteed the potatoes with garlic and rosemary, and we cooked the asparagus like you cook asparagus, kind of boiling it and kind of steaming it. this lovely time was made all the more lovelier with some apricot beer. after dinner we watched y tu mama tambien.
i realize lately i’ve been kind of beating myself up for not being a better programmer. seems i’ve kind of forgotten two important details. one. i only started programming in april. and two. i’m not a programmer. or at least i’m not exactly a programmer. i’m interested in using computers at a higher level, like using database software to build databases, or using content management software to manage content.
that said, i made a discovery today. i have two major problems with microsoft access (see: nov 21). and today i made some headway with problem (1). turns out that if you have adobe acrobat, Access can generate professional looking reports as PDFs. granted PDFs are a small evil in and of themselves, but at least at least with a PDF, style, formatting, and layout are maintained, you can minimally edit a PDF, and multiple PDFs can be assembled into to larger, complete documents. and once you have your complete PDF, it can be printed, it can be emailed, it can be put online.
develop a way to generate professional looking reports in microsoft word using microsoft access (and vba).
extract the data from present microsoft access databases to store in mysql (or oracle) while still maintaining access as client without performance hit.
investigate content/document manangement systems (CMS / DMS) for use in Measure as well as in USAID missions abroad.
explore new technologies and standards, including xml’s x-acronym siblings, etc. especially in relation to managing large numbers of documents.
learn new user-interfaces technologies including java/swing, mozilla/xul, html/php, etc. in order to access data on a database server or cms/dms.
