October 2006 archive

Stephan Kinsella, ‘Against Intellectual Property’

For today’s lecture, some libertarian thoughts on the problem of intellectual property from Stephan Kinsella.

I’m regularly exposed to libertarian ideas at places like Marginal Revolution and EconLog. I like a lot of the ideas, but I wouldn’t describe myself as libertarian.

Kinsella wrote a paper called “Against Intellectual Property.” I’m slowly making my way through it. TV and the Internet have reduced my attention span down to a nub, so I often find it challenging to digest scholarly pieces like this. Especially when the footnotes consume on average half of the page.

In “Against Intellectual Property,” he talks about the first-possessor rule of property ownership. Since I can’t be bothered …

Free Software is a Weak Mode of Production?

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 16 October 2006.

Another digg front page item, with 375+ diggs to date, resulting in more than 10,000 reads at FSM.

This one sparked a lot more discussion both at digg and at FSM, probably because of the provocative title. Maybe it would have been less inflammatory to put a question mark on there as I did here, but you know how it is when you’re needy and desperate for attention. It was meant to be a hook and brief teaser with the first paragraph, but it’s interesting how many people don’t read past to the second and third paragraphs before firing up their flamethrowers. I guess I asked for it. …

Friday Photopost? Minneapolis Stone Arch Bridge.

You have your Friday cat and squid bloggers out there, could I be a Friday photo blogger?

Update 17 Nov 2006: It may have been kind of a tease to advertise a stone arch bridge but not show more of the arches. I’ve added a few more of the bridge…

Out of curiosity, I checked Google:

“friday cat blogging” = 286,000 results
“friday squid blogging” = 28,300 results
“friday photo blogging” = 102 results

Friday cat blogging is easy to understand once you’ve seen it in action, but let’s see what Wikipedia has to say:

Catblogging
(traditionally “Friday catblogging”) is the practice of posting pictures of cats, in typical cat postures and expressions, on a blog. Sometimes a comment on the cat or the situation shown is provided. Cats had been on web pages

…

Review: Linus Torvalds, ‘Just for Fun’

Just for FunLinus Torvalds

Welcome to my inaugural minimalist review. I recently finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. “The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” Now it’s time to blurt out a few comments.

(Remember: minimalist may refer to the small amount of substantive content rather than the word count. As often happens, I may have hidden some catchier stuff at the end: Pragmatism, Idealism, and Revolution.)

I have mixed feelings about doing reviews. Who am I to criticize anything? Well, I’m certainly not especially qualified, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion, right?

I enjoyed the book. I like …

New Ad in Town

I’m afraid this post is going to be about money. I say “afraid,” because I don’t think my money concerns and ambitions are as important to you as they are to me.

But this is also about you and what a wonderful person you are, which might pique your interest.

(And I have advertisers covered also–please read on to “What’s in it for you advertisers?” for why I think this is a good site for you, even if it’s about free stuff. And I’m not excluding you from the wonderful person category.)

I noticed via TechCrunch that Performancing has a new ad network, so on a lark I decided to sign up. The “house ad” is currently running in the left sidebar. They have an auto-pricing mechanism and I’ve just had …

Architecture of Annoyance

This isn’t so much an Architectures of Control kind of item, but Dan Lockton’s post about his Epson printer made me think about my own annoyance with my HP scanner. Let’s call it an Architecture of Annoyance.

First, continuing on the pecuniary theme of a recent post, please indulge me in telling you about how I came to own the HP ScanJet 2400. Warning: The story contains a personal revelation of possible copyright infringement. (The copyright musing sprouted all kinds of shoots and leaves, but seems appropriate for a post about optical scanners.)

I don’t have sophisticated scanning needs. I previously owned some cheapo Astra scanner that worked adequately although clunkily and finally went kerplunk while I was scanning a book I had picked up from the library.

Copyright: Danger!

Oh, oh. …