Since they beat me to it and I am swamped with stuff/errands/cleaning/grading/everything else, here is the audio from Anon’s great visit to my class on Dec 8th. I will throw up a copy on my server tonight as well.

Warning: Not lots but in fact tons of expletives.

I am sure this is making the rounds but this seems like an appropriate place for this list: If Programming Languages Were Religions. My favorite description:

Lisp would be Zen Buddhism – There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach – if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it’s not a language at all; others say that it’s the only language that makes sense.

Speaking of computer languages and projects and religious holy wars, in the last few weeks I have been totally intrigued by the culture being built by the Ruby on Rails “guys.” As a researcher of Free and Open Source Software, I, like others, actually tend to see the similarities more than the difference between these two poles (in part because I focus on practice, not on the purist ideologies or two ideologues, you know who I am taking about) but it seems to me—-and I could be wrong here but I suspect I am not—-that Ruby on Rails is producing a unique Open Source culture, one that really diverges from some of the core principles of Free Software, much more so than other Open Source projects like Apache.

The rail guys as I have heard, are Open Source evangelists of a certain stripe, who are quite “cultish” (you know, it is “weird if you don’t use github, a Mac, TextMate).

What do you think of Ruby on Rails? Are the attacks fair? Are they a bunch of douchebags, as this (very incisive) post argues? Is it where Open Source meets and marries, for better or for worse, the Web 2.0 craze?

If I could clone me, this is definitely one line of research, I would love to dive into right now but since I can’t, your opinions would be greatly appreciated.

So in my first year Human Culture and Communication class we will soon be having a class on disability and communication. I wanted to show a video on eugenics to provide some historical context but I just found out that all decent videos (or ones that I have seen and thought were decent) have been pulled down.
The one I am looking for in particular is a 10 minute video by Liam Dunaway.

I find it beyond despicably pathetic that an educational video, under 10 minutes long, is not available for people to watch. For x’s sake, if one cannot easily circulate this type of video, whose whole purpose is to educate, why even bother make it? These are times when I find copyright completely totally, fully, and also absolutely ludicrous. If you are going to make a 10 minute video on a political/educational subject like Eugenics, and you don’t consider freeing it up, then there is something really contradictory driving your creative desires.

update: I wrote the filmmaker and got the word that someone had uploaded the video on their account and inappropriately connected himself to the video and so the film maker has uploaded the same video here

The very worst of the United States is summed up in this tragic story.

Today, the NYT has an interesting piece on the declining numbers of women in the field of computer science. Ultimately the article presents a bleak picture but does not give a firm sense of why this is so (I think because it is so hard to answer).

I do agree that if girls are not hopping on the computer at a young age and are not using it as a tool for production (they do use it a social tool), they are always going to have trouble catching up to men. Many CS majors, not to mention most hackers, develop quite intimate relations with the computer from a young age and thus have a level of comfort and expertise they have is nothing short of astonishing. If women are not developing that expertise as children but only much later in life, there will always be two classes of citizens in computing. Men, in other words, are native speakers, while women learn computing as a second language.

The comment I agree with less is the following:

Ms. Cassell identifies another explanation for the drop in interest, which is linked to the pejorative figure of the “nerd” or “geek.” She said that this school of thought was: “Girls and young women don’t want to be that person.”

It seems to be that in fact in the 80s and prior to that, the only word in town to describe computer folks were nerds. But geek arose to take its place and in part to take away the pejorative sting. Geek is cool. Nerd is not. And geek is now associated with all sorts of computer cultures in a way that it was not before. So it seems to be that more than ever, there is a positive geeky association with computing so in fact this would open the doors to more people than before.

I am not holding my breath but I think the B-man could in theory at least be convinced of running freedom on his laptop.

My colleague Mark Crispin Miller has written an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal Will this Election Be Stolen?. The issue he raises–voter fraud of various stripes–is the single most important issue the American electorate faces. He concludes with the following powerful thought:

It is not the failure or success of any candidate or party that most matters but the exercise of voting rights, and, through them, our self-government. If either team prevails despite the disenfranchisement of some Americans, that victory will mean all that much less; and if your favorite wins, and then the U.S. doesn’t do anything to fix its voting system (and otherwise restore this faltering democracy), that victory of his won’t matter much at all, since We the People will have lost control for good.

Seegras asked

Until Eric S. Raymond turns up in 1990 with this: “CRACKER (krak’r) n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined c. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of HACKER,
see definition #6.”

And I’ve never heard before of this; so I presume ESR himself decided that people who break into systems are now called by a name which some other group had already applied to themselves. I anyone has some documents referring to this kind of “crackers” from before 1990 and not from ESR, I’d be happy to hear of. And I’ve got plenty of documentation on the other “crackers”, those who crack copyprotection, from 1980 onwards…

Does anyone know the answer? Have any thoughts? I penned a few comments below as well but won’t repeat them here. His comment as well as Nona’s reminded me of this brilliant shirt crafted by Mathew Garret.

Since most readers of this blog are not fans of the DMCA, I thought you all might appreciate this terse and elegant insight about why the DMCA is such a failed law.

“The existence of the DMCA is an open admission that software has failure modes sufficiently severe that regulation by software alone cannot be trusted. The effectiveness of DRM software as a regulator is therefore dependent on the legal effectiveness of the DMCA … The DMCA creates a category of per se illegal software by outlawing programs that do certain things. But in so doing the DMCA aligns itself squarely against software’s plasticity. In making it illegal to create certain kinds of software, it tries to prevent people from taking full advantage of one of software’s greatest virtues: that software can do almost anything one can imagine.” James Grimmelmann in Regulation by Software, p. 1756

I have been mostly silent about the campaign here but this video is too good to remain so (and makes me wonder if Colbert and Stewart wrote the speech for Obama)