A long time ago, Lawrence Lessig wrote the book Code (1999). He argued, persuasively, that “code is law.” And “code”? It’s written, in the main, by profit-maximizing organizations. In 2003, Mark Zuckerburg launched the site that would become Facebook. You had to use a real email address and your real name. The site was, for all intents and purposes, a limited edition Match.com...

According to New York Federal District Court Judge Paul A. Crotty, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not have to return two domain names that the government seized earlier this year. The primary reason given? The Spanish company has registered alternate domain names. The domain names were seized in February due to claims (probably by FOX) of copyright infringement. However, Puerto 80 has...

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2007) Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. Shin-chan, as his family affectionately called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945 when there was a brilliant flash in the sky. The boy was about a quarter mile...

Here in the US of A we have all but forgotten the nuclear disaster in Fukishima because our own political kabuki dance is less threatening and more entertaining.  But it’s not forgotten in Japan and it shouldn’t be here either.  The reality is the situation at Fukushima Daiichi is still out of control and no one knows what’s going on or what to do about it. August 3, 2011: Highest indoor...

it’s not like in the film Amadeus, wherein the dunderheaded Emperor pettishly snaps to Mozart about his newest composition, “Too many notes, too many notes.” The Emporerr didnt know what he was talking about. But, a sizeable group of people in the USA do know when there are Too many laws, Too many laws! I have been thinking for some time when our local congressman asked us to help find docs...

The politicians of both parties, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department keep telling us that at some point economic growth will return to rates we have seen in the past.  They are: In denial Idiots Lying This is what makes debt, both government an non government, a serious problem.  The economic growth much of the world has experienced for several decades was unsustainable and has come to and end. ...

Doubting the rumor that Apple will buy Barnes & Noble, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken runs through a brief history of Apple not buying Universal Music, Pixar, TiVo, Palm, Sun Disney, Nintendo, AMD, Sony, Yahoo, EA, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, and Hulu: For years, Apple has confounded the rest of us by not buying things that it should clearly be buying. Not purchasing other well-known companies is...

The Massachusetts economy grew at an annual rate 4.3 percent from April to June. That’s more than three times faster than the national growth rate: The UMass report showed that Massachusetts added 41,300 jobs in the first half of 2011. The state’s unemployment rate fell in June to 7.6 percent, down from 8.3 percent late last year…. The report, published by the UMass Donahue Institute in collaboration...

MG Siegler comments: 15 years ago, Apple was on the verge of default. Today, the United States government is. Let’s hope that in 15 years, our government will have been able to turn it around the way Apple has. Not if the Republicans have anything to do with it! Not with their government can’t mentality and smaller government credo. Apple has $75.876 billion. The U.S. government has $73.768 billion....

UPDATED BELOW We begin at the periphery of the chain-reaction: Dave Blount / Moonbattery: NASA Data Confirm Global Warming Is a Hoax The atoms keep smashing — as with all chain-reactions, eventually damping down to zero, dependent on confinement and density as to the when but not the what. But when we trace the reaction back to its source, we find that the headline bears very little resemblance to...

As the United States nears the August 2 deadline for raising its astronomical debt ceiling, much of the world is watching with dismay. Frankfurter Rundschau columnist Thomas Spang writes that Tea Party lawmakers are close to achieving what America’s enemies ‘have only dreamed of.’ For Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau, Thomas Spang writes in part: Not even warnings from the [financial...

Was this tragedy waiting to happen? Are Anders Behring Breivik’s murders another brutal manifestation of the hysteria that started building up post 9/11? George W. Bush and his team in the White House began an era of hatred and revenge, and have added enough fuel to create confusion and fire to last a few decades. We can still see widespread smoke, if not flames, in the West and elsewhere. Was the fire...

Should China’s people feel pride that the state of California contracted over two dozen giant steel modules for the San Francisco Bay Bridge out to a firm in Shanghai rather than building them in America? In this article from the state-run Beijing Youth Daily, the author, Wang Chuantao, mixes in equal measure national pride over the progress this represents for the “Made in China” label,...

After 30 years and 135 missions the Space Shuttle program is at an end. The shuttle Atlantis made a picture perfect landing at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:56am (EST) ending its final mission and the final mission of the shuttle program. For the time being the United States will step out of the manned space launch program, though we will continue to send people to the International Space Station aboard Russian...

Perhaps the finest moment in the life of our species. Forty-two years ago today, on a hot summer evening. A species from this planet …

Sweatshop Game Screen Capture From Indie Games IchibanIf you’re Britain’s Channel 4 Education, then you think the answer to that question is more than a resounding “yes”. That’s because Channel 4 (owned by Espresso Education, not BBC4) recently launched a free online game designed to shine more than a wee of light on global fashion culture. Game designers at Littleloud consulted...

Damning evidence has been surfacing during the past decades revealing how different US administrations have been looking the other way despite Pakistan military establishment’s open role in supplying nuclear know-how to rogue regimes. Now A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, asserts that the government of North Korea bribed top military officials in Islamabad to obtain access to...

I need your help… You might remember that last fall I did a presentation titled, “Is Book A Verb? The Social Future of the Book.” The big idea in it is that we are in the midst of moving from a Literal Tradition of sharing and passing on culture to a Social Tradition. This weekend I will be updating and expanding that presentation to deliver it again on Friday at The Future of the Book Conference...

DC to Citizens: Macs Not Welcome HereGovernments should not privilege one company over another. The World Wide Web had as its genesis the problem of proprietary systems. These two truisms make the District of Columbia website an affront beyond compare. The DC Corp Online system, although designed for “businesses to conduct many transactions online”, can also serve as a citizen tool for finding information...

Let me warn you up front: I don’t pretend to have the answers here, and if the question is too disturbing, or you’d prefer to chase butterflies through greener pastures, well, I don’t blame you. But we DO have a problem and it DOES need a solution. Let me tell you a story about a little petty larceny — the larceny of memory, not of dollars. There was a man who served in the Civil War....

Default on debt – that’s the latest conversation but it’s silly.  The conversation recently has been all about a bail out of Greece.  But who’s getting bailed out?  It’s not the people of Greece but the banksters that loaned them money.  In reality the citizens of Greece would be better off if the country defaulted.  Ireland, Portugal, Spain and now Italy...

When they get around to making the ‘Idiocracy’ sequel, this has got to find its’ way into the script On July 4th, while many where camped out on blankets, or stuck in traffic, awaiting the evenings’ display of incendiary pap, I was doing some work, and had the radio on, only stopping, mouth agape, to shake my head in disbelief, when this report came on. It was from PRI’s ‘The...

Your moment of geek For the first time since it was discovered by humans in 1846 the planet Neptune has completed an orbit around the sun.

Could it be that after years of protecting Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, also known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Islamabad may be preparing to prosecute him for providing nuclear technology to rogue states? According to this editorial from Pakistan’s Frontier Post, a letter allegedly passed on by Dr. Khan to a British researcher may be a CIA forgery. If genuine, however, the document...

With the release of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn from house arrest in New York, it seems that the soul-searching that had descended on French media over giving the influential a pass on their personal behavior has almost completely reversed itself. For Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, columnist Olivier Picard laments that when it comes to being neutral observers of events, French journalists...