Because It Requires No Mental Effort

1. Go into your journal's archives.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal (see below) along with these instructions.

" ... and I'm about to fall asleep. With luck I'll make it to bed first. I just wanted to say Hi! to azrhey and I'm glad she decided to join our little online gossip-swap community."

Oops.

I had planned to post a message describing the LJ meetup, but it turns out that there is a bug in my firewall setup that is interfering with the image I want to post. I'm fairly sure I know why too. I have this vague memory of thinking 'Now is the time to remove this ad-hoc shim and do things the secure way', when I was upgrading the firewall, so the shim went out, but I never put the secure gizmo in its place, so some of the machines inside my firewall are now slightly schizo. Isn't technology FUN???

F34R My SN002E!

With my 1337 S133P1NG SK1LL2 I've managed to sleep in until now. Have awoken with the twinges that MAY want to turn into a migraine, so I've taken some AC&C and am strongly caffinating myself.

Other than that, I don't really have much to say. Those who've been reading my occasional posts lately have probably been bored stiff. Much of my days have been taken up with either the minutia of firewall and/or server configuration or with running errands for taxlady who is now in full-fledged OHMYGODTHEDEADLINEISNIGH! mode, and so has hardly any time for sleep, never mind eating.

She will be able to breath a sigh of relief on Saturday, but she's most likely to simply collapse into bed and sleep the first post-deadline day away. Then, of course, things start building up for the lesser rush in mid June.

Oh well, at least we're both keeping busy and our spirits are high.

Free Culture.

Traditionally, human culture has been a cooperative act, with each new wave of artists building upon and borrowing from the best that has come before. Current copyright laws actively interfere with this process. Shakespeare is rightly called one of the greatest writers of all time, but he freely borrowed from all of the greatest works of literature of his time. I don't think he would be the shining star of English Literature that he is, had he had to start from scratch, as most writers today are forced to do.

Now, most of my life I've been producing intellectual property for one company or another, and most of it is copyrighted. I have yet to see a case where this has benefitted the company that holds the copyrights, and I've seen quite a few cases where this has worked to the detriment of another company (and never a competitor). So, while I don't think that current copyright law is as severely broken as, for instance, patent law, it still needs an overhaul. The Disney corporations of the world are using their considerable lobbying skills to try to lock in ownership of the culture that geniuses like Walt Disney did so much to foster.

This is, however, not a simple issue and there are many arguments, good and bad, on both sides of the debate. Anyway, one of the major voices on the side I believe in, Lawrence Lessig, has just released a book on the subject called Free Culture, and in the best money-where-your-mouth-is tradition, he's letting people buy the hardcopy or just download the pdf for free. Since he has released the book without hindrance, someone has taken the full text and stored it in a Wiki so that the next edition will have been jointly edited by the public. If that's not a clear example of the sorts of things being stifled by current copyright laws, I don't know what is.