Fen Labalme

My wife and I are eagerly looking forward to seeing the movie An Inconvenient Truth - we'd have seen it already if we had baby sitting lined up, and have arranged for this on the 19th of June. I'm confident that the movie will move us deeply. I just read a colleague's blog post on the movie, and I received the list of links below from another close friend.

From the virtual desk of Declan McCullagh: Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill (CNET):

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite.

Found on Digg:

3 convicted of jamming phones to a Democratic get out the vote campaign in New Hampshire. Turns out there had been more than 2 dozen calls between these guys and the White House, all within 3 days of election day 2004.

I have watched in great sadness as well as some very real fear for my profession as I've seen software - and worse: process - patents gain hold in this country driven by forces of great wealth and power aimed at maintaining their wealth and power at the cost of innovation. I was in the software labs of the late '70s when things like object oriented programming, bitmapped displays, email, and modern operating system theory were being developed and nothing was even copyrighted.

I regularly read SlashDot, which is a geek news site that gives paragraph intros to a linked full story and then people can comment on it. One section of their site, called Your Rights Online recently published this article reporting about a Dartmouth student being visited by the SS after requesting a book that contains information contrary to the state.