I just had to post about this. Check out this hilarious short movie, Fellowship 9/11. IFilm.com hosts the actual movie. It appears they have lots of independent short movies available.
Fellowship 9/11
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Author Archives: Dan Siemon
Creative Commons Canada
Oh happy day. Creative Commons Canada is being officially launched in Ottawa today. This means that there are now versions of the Creative Commons licenses available that are tailored to Canadian copyright law.
If you don’t know what the Creative Commons is, you need to spend some time watching the MPEG and Flash movies on the primary Creative Commons site.
Canadian murder statistics
Despite what the “always bad news first” nightly news programs may make you think murder rates were at a 30 year low in 2003.
It’s too bad that the CBC decided it was necessary to feature the bad news predominately. CTV also managed to put in their own little bit of fear mongering on the eleven o’clock news.
More Canadian copyright stuff
Michael Geist has written another great piece encouraging balanced copyright reform.
I still find it surprising that the Liberal led Heritage committee is so biased towards the content creators. Content creation groups have apparently out numbered content user groups at these hearings by a wide margin. How can this be right? Surely, there are more people using copyrighted material than there are creators. It’s odd how governments can forget who they actually represent.
I think the biggest obstacle to reasonable discussions on intellectual property issues is that it is very easy to quantify what more restrictive laws will do for the content creators; it’s all money. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to quantify the loss that is incurred throughout our culture by these same laws. What is the cost of works not entering the public domain? What interesting new industries could be formed by freed content? What is the cost when a school teacher cannot adequately teach her students? These are all next to impossible to quantify.
People like simple things. I believe our governmental representatives are no exception. Perhaps they are just leaning towards what they actually can get a mental grip on.
Left and Right political views via Amazon
Valdis Krebs has found a really interesting use of some Amazon book data. Amazon suggests books based on “People who bought this book also bought X”. Valdis uses this information to graph the left and right of the American political spectrum. You can find the graph and some background here.
How can there ever be a productive political debate when the two sides don’t take the time to understand the other sides arguments?
This graph was built with social network mapping software called InFlow. It’s interesting to see computers being used to study the relationships between people.
Copyright in the digital world
In Copyright vs. The Laws of Physics the author discusses copying in the digital world. In reality, every action on digital information involves copying. This is the fundamental reason why copy protection on computers is so hard. Lawrence Lessig touches on this in Free Culture too.
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.
— Bruce Schneier
The Twelve Networking Truths
CBC and Internet streaming
George Farris alerted me to a change in the way CBC does radio streaming on the Internet. Previously, CBC supported QuickTime, Real Player and Windows Media player. As of August 30, 2004 they only support Windows Media player. CBC has an announcement about this change which they ironically call “Live CBC Radio streaming improvements”. You can find the link to it on this page.
From the perspective of a desktop Linux user this decision is bad. There is no easy way to listen to Windows Media streams from Linux. Real Player was not open source but at least it worked in Linux. Since the CBC audio streams were the only reason I had Real Player installed I guess I can remove it now. I always felt bad having it installed anyway.
From a free software perspective this decision doesn’t really change much. Both Real and Windows Media are proprietary formats. I wish there was some way to make the general computing audience understand that free does not equal standard. A standard way to stream audio or video over the Internet would allow anyone to do their own implementation. The free downloads offered by Microsoft and Real in the form of Windows Media player and Real Player are just a way to lock the user into their technology. Standards that allow others to innovate drive the world forward not proprietary lock-in.
There is hope for standards based Internet media. Xiph.Org is building a set of truly free audio and video codecs. Also, Fluendo is building a free software streaming media server that will use the free codecs from Xiph.Org.
Queueing
I little while ago I asked a friend to proof read my LQL project page. We ended up in a discussion about the proper spelling of Queueing. Bob blogged about this conversation over here so I won’t bother repeating the outcome. However, I would like to add this one link that provides additional information.
Bell Canada call answer tip.
I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before. If you have Bell Canada‘s call answer service you can speak to the person who is leaving a message by pressing the flash or link button on your phone. This makes using the voice mail more effective for screening calls as well as allowing you to still speak to the caller even if you couldn’t get to the phone quite fast enough.