excerpts category archive

YARQ! Quotes and Excerpts and Snippets, Oh My!

I like quotes and excerpts. I’m not a big fan of the signature quote in emails and forums — it becomes repetitive to see the same pearls of wit and wisdom over and over and over again — but in general I like a good quote and have collected quite a few over the years.

(Skip ahead past techie background info to read about the exciting new MovingToFreedom.org site feature…)

I’d been thinking lately about adding some kind of random quote feature here, and this weekend after writing a couple of posts I needed something to prevent me from doing other pressing tasks, so I started toying around with the idea. I considered a custom PHP feature, and although it would be a good learning exercise and fun for …

Michel Bauwens comments on the dark side of peer to peer

I first became aware of the P2P Foundation last year after Michel Bauwens sent me a nice email in response to “Free software is a weak mode of production?” I’ve since followed the P2P Foundation blog in my feed reader.

It is delightfully information-dense with good pointers and commentary about peer production. It can also be hard to keep up with, given my scattershot approach to information absorption. I should take more time to read and think about the ideas presented there by Michel and others.

An entry by Michel today is typically thoughtful and thought-provoking. He apparently has a deep well of enthusiasm and energy to draw from for this subject, and I’m glad someone is saying these things so eloquently. I love reading stuff like this, conveying so …

Who will own (and police) our digital future?

So the RIAA and MPAA want the colleges and universities (and corporations and your grandmother and etc.) to enforce our out-of-control copyright laws. It’s disturbing how much power these organizations already wield, and how much more power they think they should have in dictating how free the flow of information should be. Our future is digital, with infinite possibilities for freedom, but these guys would prefer that artificial scarcity rules the game.

(via Against Monopoly)

[…]

Reid’s amendment is a clear illustration of the effectiveness of lobbying. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think the trade groups actually wrote the text of the law. It vests in these groups a vast amount of money–taxpayer money–and, hence, power.

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Brian Behlendorf: Open Source as a Business Strategy

I just finished reading Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, which is a collection of essays about free and open source software edited by Chris DiBona (and others) and published by O’Reilly in January of 1999. It’s an interesting snapshot of free software at the time and it still reads very well today. Much of it is well-tread ground, but there were things new to me, and there is this good passage explaining why we should prefer free and open software and standards over proprietary platforms (emphasis added by me):

There are businesses built upon the model of owning software platforms. Such a business can charge for all use of this platform, whether on a standard software installation basis, or a pay-per-use basis, or perhaps some other model. Sometimes platforms

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For the Love of Problem Solving…

I’ve had a StarTribune op-ed piece by Garrison Keillor sitting on my desk for the past month (or two), waiting to be commented on here. Sometimes if I have an item age that much, I just toss it in the recycle bin, but this one still wants to be written about.

Picture of anthillcourtesy of Global Voices.

Keillor wrote about the passing of Fortran creator John Backus:

These days I’m indifferent to militance and more inspired by the worker ants of science. The patient accumulation of data, the dry formulation of theory, the countless little defeats, then the big leap forward that changes the world. I don’t have the mind for it but I appreciate those who do, such as John W. Backus, who died recently at

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A Charismatic Operating System?

Ray Kurzweil occasionally uses imaginary conversations as a device to discuss ideas in his books The Singularity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines. They usually involve people from the future and the past (Ned Ludd, for example). Here is a more contemporaneous dialog between himself and a pretend Bill Gates from Singularity:

BILL: What would the principles of the new religion be?
RAY: We’d want to keep two principles: one from traditional religion and one from secular arts and sciences—from traditional religion, the respect for human consciousness.
BILL: Ah yes, the Golden Rule.
RAY: Right, our morality and legal system are based on respect for the consciousness of others. […]
BILL: And the secular

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