If you hate the phone as much as I but are forced to talk on it quite a bit, here is a highly addictive game you canplay at the same time.

So terror is among us. We know this, Bush has told us. But because terror is with us, we must terrorize others, in ways, that are clearly illegal. As reported in the New York Daily News, the abuse of detainees is not ordinary, but extraordinary, much more pervasive that we may think.

It is more than disquieting, and it makes me wonder what ideological justifications are used by abusers to mask the effects of what they are doing. Sometimes, I think they probably rely on some relational logic. Like what we are doing is not so bad, because these prisoners remain alive and with very few visible bruises. In other “nations” there is “real abuse.”

Something like the logic of “this torture is like diet coke, diet terror, really not so bad, even if it leaves a bitter aftertaste…” Sometimes, however, we find out only much later, that the diet was way worse than the real thing, in part because we could never point to the “reality” of what is out there……

All right I consider myself lucky sometimes. I have a really fun dissertation topic and right now I am in one of the funner parts of my diss, narrating a typical “life history” of a free software developer.

Ok, so I know there is no typical life history but there are consistent patterns that I gleaned from interviews (way too many interviews, I may add), and I am trying with detail and humor to portray hacking from the time that hackers are spring chickens to their ripe old age of 40 when they work on a free software project. I get to do this in about 30 pages but I open with a one page overview of what is to come that is somewhat silly which I like becomes it comes after this very serious discussion about phenomenology, and publics. If anyone has read the Hacker Crackdown, I am clearly indebted to Bruce Sterling.

“The spirit of exploration that forms the basis for hacking is retroactively understood by many hackers to predate their relationship to computers. It may start at the tender age of three, when they first took apart every electric appliances in the kitchen, much to a mother’s horror; lead into learning how to program at the age of five, the parental unit now overjoyed (

Via Mako, us ladies can rest assured… WIPO is forging links between women and IP. My favorite part of the page are the pictures, especially the ballet shoes. Very female, very intellectual propertyish.