Welcome to the TAM London 2010 live blog! From Saturday morning I'll be bringing you regular updates, audio clips, photos and maybe even the odd video clip from The Amazing Meeting, a two day celebration of science and critical thinking.
One of the biggest stories over the three year negotiation of ACTA has been the willingness of the U.S. to cave on the Internet provisions. When it first proposed the chapter, the U.S. was seeking new intermediary liability requirements with three strikes and you're out used as an example of an appropriate policy as well as language that attempted to create a global DMCA. The draft released today is a far cry from that proposal with the intermediary liability provisions largely removed and the DMCA digital lock provisions much closer to the WIPO Internet treaty model. In its place, is a chapter that is best viewed as ACTA Ultra-Lite. For Canadians, this is crucial since it now leaves an ACTA that is far more flexible than even Bill C-32. In fact, the Canadian copyright bill now exceeds the requirements under ACTA and could be amended in a manner that will allow for greater balance on digital locks and still be ACTA compliant.
Slate’s Emily Yoffe wins the “Quote of the Week” award with her answer to a gay man who asked whether he and his boyfriend should refrain from non-salacious, “welcome-home” kisses in front of the neighbor’s children, after the neighbor said it would “confuse” the kids
Tevatron not dead, or so it seems. Although these days all eyes are turned to the LHC, the old Tevatron is still capable to send the HEP community into an excited state. Last Friday the D0 collaboration presented results of a measurement suggesting the standard model is not a complete description of physics in colliders. The paper is already available at this link, and it should be out on arXiv tonight.
When I was originally designing the Google Chrome icon, I went through many iterations to figure out how to best represent our brand new web browser. The design needed to stand out on the desktop, look stable yet dynamic, and use color to show some Google branding. Through the design process, another quality that became important to the team was to make the icon feel like a real, tangible object so that clicking on it would be like pressing a real button.
On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the licensing change that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the GNU Free Documentation License as the primary content license to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig tweeted that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “free culture win” in the Creative Commons blog.
The BBC is hoping to launch a new project (codenamed ‘Canvas ’) that will bring web-based programming to the TV. Project Canvas is a partnership with BBC, ITV and BT, and will encourage an open-industry standard that will allow “platform-neutral publishing ”; web-based TV will be able to move from the computer to television. Additionally, the BBC is planning to engage with Adobe AIR, which could allow cross-platform downloading.
Project Kangaroo has been deemed to be too restrictive of competition by the UK Competition Commission. Today it became official, as Britain’s antitrust agency said it “would be too much of a threat to competition in this developing market and has to be stopped”.
Glenn Greenwald, New York Times bestselling author and former constitutional law and civil rights litigator, shares opinions through his political blog.
I should have realized the danger of stepping into the Wikipedia morass, and the comments on today’s earlier post further indicate my folly in doing so. You know, The New York Times gets things wrong, too. As an argument on a sophisticated level, it’s that all texts are constructs reflecting the attitude of the constructor rather than a verifiable external reality; on a less sophisticated level, it’s that all the other kids are smoking pot, too.
I’ve had enough. I’m bringing it down to this challenge.
Since fatuously declaring his to be a "change" administration, President Barack Obama has quickly donned the blood-spattered mantle of state secrecy and executive privilege worn by the Bush regime.
My copyrighted photo is now spreading around the world tagged as “Public Domain”, with no reference to me as photographer. Thanks to wikipedia. However the photo is still copyrighted by me, I did never change the license.
My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.”