Is your first thought when you see this picture, “someone better take those precious replica lightsabers out of the hands of those reckless juveniles”? If your email address starts with “starwarsaddictors” it is.
Scot Hacker posts a picture at he took at SXSW of a dude with a Creative Commons logo shaved into the back of his head. Scot asked the guy for permission to take the picture, and the guy said sure, just so long as you publish your photo with a CC license.
It was polite of Scot to comply with the guy’s request (and when I was taking photos for Wired News at ETech I always asked permission of the subjects, again out of politeness), but this is one case where Creative Commons is actually more restrictive than the general law. In fact, you can photograph anyone you want without asking permission, provided they’re in a public place. You can also photograph any building you want, provided you are standing in a public place. Then you own the copyright to your photo. Here’s a handy one-page guide explaining photographers’ rights (PDF).
“Basically, anyone can be photographed without their consent except when they have secluded themselves in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy such as dressing rooms, restrooms, medical facilities, and inside their homes.”
There was upheld in a recent case, incidentally. An art photographer was taking random photos of people on the street in NYC. One man got upset to find his photo was on display in a gallery, for sale, and sued the artist, saying he had no right to profit from his likeness. The judge dismissed that suit last month.
Happiness has a manifesto?! It seems to involve spending time on the BBC web site and watching BBC comedies, which is not surprising given that the manifesto comes from the BBC. Has anyone ever put the words “BBC” and “happiness” in a sentence together before now? Actually the tips are not bad advice but the picture of the screaming meemie at the top of the page made me instantly grumpier.
BBC - Lifestyle - TV and radio - Happiness manifesto (The plain text PDF has no screaming meemies, fortunately.)
Not ready for show time yet, but still pretty cool (and environmentally-friendly, too, the researchers claim): World’s first transparent integrated circuit created
Note: I started writing this post last Fall. Then, all this house construction happened, we got rained out of our home and had to move, and I kind of lost track of the post. It’s been sitting around in my “Drafts” folder since then. Rather than delete it, I decided to finish and publish it now.
During the last couple of years of the 20th century, I spent way too much time worrying about the end of the world. The popular form for that obsession then — in the narrow window between fears of nuclear holocaust and anxiety over terrorist attacks — was the Y2K bug. I knew a little about computer technology, just enough to be able to imagine the form such bugs might take in, say, a poorly-maintained Russian nuclear missile silo. You can imagine, as I did, a launch counter that depended on a date field with a two-digit year; when the time ticked over to 00-00-00, who knows what that counter might do. Launch decrepit but still volatile warheads in our general direction?
Failing nuclear error, there were still ways in which the switch from 1999 to 2000 could go completely haywire. Malfunctioning basic utilities, lights going out all over the cities, rioting in the streets. I was nervous enough about it that I actually stayed home on New Year’s Eve that year. No big sacrifice, given the homebodies that we are — but still a mistake. Watching the celebrations in downtown San Francisco on the TV screen, I suddenly realized that I’d blown it. I let my fear of a hypothetical unknown get the better of me, and it cost me a good night out on the town.
So I learned a thing or two — mostly, not to fall too much under the sway of my own naturally pessimistic and apocalyptic fantasies. People have tended to get freaked out about impending dooms of one sort or another for millennia, I suspect. Early Christians thought that the end of the world was at hand. Hindu and Buddhist religions both view our ages as the latest, and most decrepit, of a series of increasingly corrupt epochs. Twentieth century movements of various sorts have all viewed our time as one of decline, despite rather stunning evidence to the contrary.
That’s why I found it unsurprising, but pretty depressing, when I read Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s gloomy WSJ opinion piece (from October) about how she has the sense that things are falling apart. Even David Weinberger got caught up in the gloom, figuring that his kids will be less privileged than he is and that the overall direction of “the bus” is wrong. But, he adds a hopeful note:
But I think that’s also why so many of us are so invested in the Internet. That’s the fresh start we’ve been looking for. It’s a world that’s more connected, more creative and more fair than the real world.
Me, I’m trying hard to be less pessimistic about the future and to do so without become overly gullible or credulous. Now, I’m no Martin Seligman acolyte, but the guy does have a good point or two: If you focus exclusively on the apocalypse, your thinking will become apocalyptic. If you take some time to write down (in a journal, say) what you appreciate and what you’re grateful for, it shifts your perspective–and makes it easier for you to accomplish things that just might make the world a little better.
Like Weinberger, I think the Internet has great potential to shift the direction of world history, and it probably has already begun to do so. Google, del.icio.us, Digg — I welcome the mad explosion of interconnected knowledge that these and other technologies are spawning. It’s fantastic that news of a new hairy lobster can spread around the world in just a couple of weeks. I love sitting in the midst of this wild web of noise, ideas, music, and information. The trick is, what do you draw out of the infostream? Noise, confusion, and depression? Or can you make sense of the bits as they fly by and start to assemble a new picture, one that holds a bit more hope for the future?
For proof that taking the long view doesn’t have to be depressing, consider this modest exposition: Buckminster Fuller: Everything I know. Now there was an optimist.
Tim O’Reilly posts a lengthy list of links from the Reading 2.0 summit in SF yesterday, which covers a range of issues relevant to libraries and publishers, including DRM, tagging, microformats, access, and more.
Roller Derby queen and former Bay City Bomber Ann Calvello has died at the age of 76.
Glad it wasn’t my $300 robot Torrone sent out into traffic, that crazy guy: Roomba takes Frogger to the asphalt jungle | CNET News.com
Not much. She is the author/screenwriter of Bewitched and Sleepless in Seattle, after all, not an Internet expert. But for some reason, being a popular screenwriter of romantic comedies is enough to get you invited to internet conferences, and so there she was, looking around at a bunch of geeks last week at an unnamed conference. (It was not ETech, I know that much.) A video of Thomas Friedman had a starring role. But what Ephron lacks in technical chops, she makes up for in observational skills. She pegs a few things about conference life: The special uber-class of professional panelists, like Friedman. The endless self-congratulating, hyping atmosphere. And the tendency for the pundits to get everything wrong. Their last mistake: There’s no money in internet advertising. Their current mistake: We’ll all get rich on internet advertising.
She does drop in a nice definition of “content,” too: that which appears alongside the ads. A more concise and accurate definition I’ve never seen.
The Blog | Nora Ephron: And By the Way, the World Is Not Flat | The Huffington Post
Photographs of a “sky burial,” where vultures are invited to eat the corpse: Tibetan sky burial in China. (And here’s another eyewitness account, with better text but no pics)
