Category: Worth a Look

WordPress 2.5 is finally out.  Hopefully the reader won’t notice any difference, even though it took quite a bit of tweaking to get the style to work :/

Lots of nice things on the back end including AJAX slickness, easy ways to add media to a post, and an asthetically pleasing interface. I’ve been watching all of the trac activity over the last few days and all I can say is: way to go WordPress team.

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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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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