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Freenet, especially now that its reaching the point of widespread usability.

Sugar is awful, read here about installing Ubuntu and using XFCE, its far more usable.

I've never seen anyone use it though.

Were you trying to be ironic?

It may be a nice (if strange) ideal to think that lawyers only have the opinions they are paid to have, but it simply isn't true.

From Ian Clarke's blog


Check it out here, let me know what you think (PS. the website will shut down automatically if it starts getting too many hits, so tell your friends, but don't tell /. ;-).

This article has a review of the player. Not ready from prime time software buat a great idea though. As another poster pointed it its based on the open source Irate software .
It also looks like an ipod shuffle sideways with a screen.

When the page is done with its slashdotting, you can submit your music to the indy page

I mean, much as I hate to criticise one of Slashdot's fatted calves, and much as I recognise how innovative Google is, and what a keen grasp they clearly have of how to design user interfaces for the web, Google are answerable to shareholders, not some higher moral sense, much as we all would like to think that they are.

I recently wrote a blog entry on this subject, and suggested that it should be possible to create a decentralised, cooperative P2P web search network that could do what Google does, but without any centralised reliance on a service, but rather a decentralised reliance on other people. Click the link for more detail about how this could be achieved in a scalable way.

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the MGM vs Grokster case today. For those living under a rock, at issue is the legal decision that prevented the movie industry from killing the VCR in the mid-80s (the "Sony-Betamax decision"). In retrospect the Supreme Court did them a big favour since most of the movie industry's revenue now comes from video rentals. Unfortunately the movie industry has not learned its lesson.

"Secondary copyright infringement" is when you yourself don't actually infringe copyright, but you somehow facilitate someone else doing it. I assume that this was originally intended as a way to get at the people that run "swap meets" where people exchange copies of software and CDs in violation of copyright law.

In the 1980s the Supreme Court said that the creator of a technology cannot be sued for secondary infringement if their technology is "capable of substantial non-infringing use", in effect creating a "shield" against secondary liability for technology creators. In the case of Grokster, two previous court judgements have said that this doctrine protects decentralised P2P software, in the same way that it shielded the creator of the VCR. The movie industry would like to see this shield weakened enough that Grokster and similar P2P file-sharing networks are no-longer protected by it.

Their opponents (myself included) fear that any weakening of this shield will create exactly the kind of legal uncertainty that can kill innovations before they have even made it out of the venture capitalist's office (and as a veteran of a number of VC's offices, I can attest to the fact that nothing turns them off like the threat of a legal battle).

If you don't mind Real Video, you can watch a great debate between Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodore Olson, Former Solicitor General for the Bush Administration (2001-2004) and Representative of the Recording Industry and Motion Pictures Association here.

The argument only took place a few hours ago, but you can read a good summary from someone that appears to know their stuff here. His assessment? It went better for Grokster than he expected, but it is extremely dangerous to draw any conclusions from the oral argument phase of a court case.

The result was interesting, and from it I created a nice MPEG video which illustrates the learning process - you can find this if you follow the link above.

One interesting thing I discovered was the importance of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction (insert lewd joke here) as I describe in a follow-up blog entry:

My first approach was simply to take the creature that performed best, and use it as the basis for the entire next generation, each of which contained random variations.

This approach was somewhat effective, although it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution, but where most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima".

So I tried a different approach where we start out with completely random creatures for the first generation, as before, but instead of just taking the best and losing everything else, we take neighbours and "merge" them, where the better one forms 90% of the children's make-up, and the worse one the remaining 10%.

This had the effect of being much more resilliant against local minima as it gave more scope for the GA to try different options and where it found a good one, that may not be the best one, it kept it around for the next generation.

If anything Europeans need to fight harder against this stuff because often those arguing against it are arrogant Americans whose argument is often "we do it in the US, therefore you must too". The irony often is that they have a harder time pushing it in the US than elsewhere.

I had a recent experience of this type of thing in teh debate over software patents in the EU.

Makes me think of Ian's program Locutus. A decentralized file searching tool.

So why not try the best anti-spam tool on the market and wave goodbye to those pesky spams?!

Something similar is already happening in healthcare - doctors cannot afford to do their job while paying the "lawyer tax" to protect themselves against being sued for malpractice. If a powerful lobby like healthcare can't fight the lawyers - what hope do a bunch of geeks have when their beef is even less-easily articulated to the general public?

The patent system is rapidly achieving the exact opposite of what it is intended to achieve. It is providing strong disincentives to true innovation while lining the pockets of those whose only innovative ideas consist of new ways to exploit the patent system.

The solution? I propose a non-profit organization to which patents can be donated, which will use those patents to defend anyone sued for infringement of a software patent. email me if you are interested in helping me to make it happen.

Another technology that you probably fear is P2P sharing. This is another useful tool that I believe will start to make an impact on the business world. Locutus is what I have set up for them, and they are able to share documents/media that have had to have been requested while still making sure priveleges and security are a priority.

Perhaps you didn't like the computer -- imagine the gaming that would go on...

Wide adoption of THIS project as reviewed on slashdot a while ago.

According to the locutus faq, the developers will not be releasing source to the app. Doesn't look like they're interested in ports.

Yes, I've done that five minutes of work. Well, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. I personally think Miguel is on to something truly wonderful with the project. But thanks for offering your help.

My point was this: as written, locutus is a pure Windows-only app, which was not in any way apparent from the original posting. And, according to the faq, the developers of locutus do not intend to release the source for the app, which means no porting to Mono, lisp, Applescript, FORTRAN, or anything else for that matter. Only for Windows.

While I have no objection to people wanting to develop for any platform they want to, it's always been my impression that /. is not primarily geared toward Windows developers. There are plenty of those. All I'm saying is, it'd be nice if Michael, or anyone else posting, would at least mention something to the effect to "this app won't run unless you have windows." In the context, I don't think it's too much to ask.

What do your lamer Scottish friends say when you tell them you've got a .us domain? "But it spells Locutus! I am so very clever!" Oh, yes, laddie... now run along now and play with your Next Generation action figures! By the way, who wants to bet that this picture was taken at a Star Trek convention where Mr. Sanity was wearing a homemade officer's jumpsuit?