Author: john

Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time

Slate is running a brief montage about rebuilding public libraries, asking “What sort of public library does the “digital world” of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle require?” This is right along track with a dialogue some of my colleagues have been having with the UW-Madison libraries as we also consider what the “library of the future” might look like. Rather than a warehouse of books, many see libraries as a re-emerging community space. I’m sympathetic to this view, but at the same time, there are elements of the library of the past that are worth keeping around:

Copenhagen, Denmark

Library at Copenhagen University

First Amendment story unfolds online

Wikileaks.org has been ordered (last week!? how did I miss that?) to be taken completely offline in the United States because of a number of documents that “allegedly reveal that [a Swiss] bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.” While it appears that the site is still available, but many are calling the injunction unconstitutional. I’m surprised I haven’t heard the words “prior restraint” used yet. You make the call: is this just commercial speech, or is posting to wikileaks a political act? If it’s political, is the “heavy burden” against censoring someone before they publish met? Is wikileaks acting as the “press?” Must they to receive protection?
This is another one to watch

Better than free

BETTER THAN FREE

Here’s a really interesting read on the relative cost of things that are easy to copy.

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

The conclusion? There are 8 things that can’t be copied that have the potential to make something even “better than free,” even though some of these things (like immediacy or interpretation) might have a cost attached. I’d like to think about how these “generatives” play out in the physical, or for-pay digital, world… but not today.
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Next Year’s Laws, Now Out In Beta!

Here’s an interesting idea on how legislation drafting might follow the “development cycle” used for software.  The post turns into a rant on civil procedure by Commander Taco, but it’s interesting food for thought.

If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other.

Slashdot | Next Year’s Laws, Now Out In Beta!
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