The Pope and our President seem to agree: gay marriage is immoral and thus should be illegal. (In all fairness, conservative Jews and Muslims share this point of view, but I’ll stick to current events for now). They also agree that safe sex is a bad thing…. unless by that you mean “no sex,” in […]
I subscribe to T-Mobile because I get to use the funky Sony Ericsson T68i which synchronizes wirelessly with my Powerbook’s address book. To most American cell phone users, it makes sense that phones are specific to a given network: Sprint PCS phones do not work with Verizon, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. […]
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different.” I took the Eurostar from Paris to London this past weekend. The Eurostar is effectively a French TGV that crosses from the French rail system to the British one via a 120km tunnel. On the French side, the train is the fastest […]
Today, the French banned the word ’email’. First, an explanation. Jean Dupont on the street will not get thrown in jail just for saying “I sent mon amour a leetle email.” This is an attempt to affect human behavior not through threat of criminal penalty, but through government normative pressure. The French government and all […]
Governor and Presidential Candidate Howard Dean is guest blogging for Larry Lessig. I’m impressed by the Dean campaign. I can’t say I agree with everything he’s proposing, but there’s something viscerally enticing about a man looking for a show of numbers and not just raw cash: more people behind him, not just more money from […]
In a 2000 election debate, Gore attacked Bush on his gay-rights record by accusing him of being too lenient on hate-motivated criminals. Bush’s response was along the lines of “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I give those people the death penalty. How can I get any less lenient?” In one statement, Bush managed […]
Tim O’Reilly says: paradigm shift: software as a commodity. Small, reusable pieces new killer apps: Google, Amazon, eBay, Paypal open-source licenses don’t work because no redistribution occurs for these killer apps the value in software is moving up the stack, specifically to lock-in via user data. This is a very interesting and useful analysis. Noticing […]
In May, I took the the TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse = Very Fast Train in French) from Paris to Aix-en-Provence. A very smooth, comfortable, 900km ride in 3 hours flat, all thanks to billions of euros spent building the TGV’s high-performance rails while respecting dozens of environmental regulations. The TGV is also one of […]
Harvard students and 15 year-olds are blogging away. 580,000 blogs are indexed and ranked. Salon has blogs. So here I am. Talk about being late to the party. It’ll take me a few weeks to get the hang of the blogging world from the publisher end, though I certainly expect to touch on the following: […]
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