Slashback: Justice, Settlement, Cosmos

Slashback tonight with updates on the Supreme Court's take on takings, money available for unlucky DeskStar disk drive owners, Parliament's Jedi, and more. Read on for the details.

"It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration ..." zarathud writes "Logan Darrow Clements has begun the application process to build a hotel on land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. This could be allowed under Eminent Domain after the controversial 5-4 Kelo vs. New London ruling which Souter voted for. Justice Souter's home currently occupies the land. The planned hotel, to be called 'The Lost Liberty Hotel,' will include a public exhibit on the loss of American Freedom. 'This is not a prank,' said Clements, 'The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development.'"

Call everyone Sir, just to be safe. Yesterday we posted an item about the first self-proclaimed Jedi in Parliament; here are two updates to the already-updated story. Americans (like me!) may still be baffled by the complications of the honorifics involved.

Stefan Magdalinski writes "If you want to link to the actual speech, then can I suggest you use our volunteer-run, open source, reimplementation of parliament's awful website?"

And reader Russell Dewhurst writes "All MPs (Members of Parliament) are called the Hon. Member for X... If the MP for Copeland were a Privy Councillor he would be the _Rt_ Hon (Right Honourable) Member for Copeland. So the original article was correct, and the correction was wrong, I'm afraid!"

Thanks to everyone who's weighed in on this.

MozNews interviews Daniel Glazman, NVu Lead Dev bluephone writes "Now that NVu 1.0 has been officially released, we at MozillaNews asked Daniel Glazman to take some time to give us another interview to book-end our first interview with him, early in NVu's development. He was gracious as always, and fast! Read the interview for unavoidable laws, plans for the future of NVu and Daniel, and even news about his company's upcoming release."

Tom Clancy, eat my shorts. hydraa16 writes "The Cosmos 1 Solar Sail failed to reach orbit. This video shows its loading in a Russian Delta III Submarine, and its launch in the cold Barents Sea!"

If you accidentally blew up your DeskStar, the Empire will repay you. hardreset writes "Remember the day when the IBM 75GXP was the hot new drive? Then ... do you remember the day(s) it bit the dust? If you still have the serial number(s), you may be eligible for a $100/drive settlement from IBM. The settlement page is over here, claim form is here, and the Inquirer article is here. For those of you wearing tinfoil hats, you don't have to send in your drive. For those of you who work for IBM or live overseas, don't bother. If you're hoarding these drives, it might be a good payday!"

You'd have to pay me a lot to listen to the results. Kethinov writes "Because Trent Reznor's release of The Hand That Feeds was a spectacular success, he's decided to release more free musical source material for remixing and listening delight. The new release is another track off his new album With Teeth entitled Only. Interestingly, now he's offering multiple formats for the material instead of just Apple's Garageband format. So now non Apple users too can join the fun."

Comments

Lost Liberty Hotel?

[Locke2005]

Damn! Where do I invest? Sure sounds like poetic justice to me!

Re:Lost Liberty Hotel?

[mikeswi]

People are surprised because Eminent Domain is meant to serve the public interest by taking property to build a highway or pipeline or something useful.

These people's government just seized their property to hand it over to a corporation to build an office tower. The only interests being served there is someone's bank account.

I applaud the effort to seize Souter's property. I doubt it will actually happen but I'm glad to see it. Maybe if those justices had been personally under threat of being sold into slavery themselves, the Dred Scott case would have turned out differently.

As a supporter of Fair Use...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I strongly believe the government should instigate a policy of Eminent Domain on Intellectual Property, not just Real Property.

It would work like this: once a work reached a critical mass of popularity, the government would sieze it, pay the creator a reasonable sum, and make the work freely available for downloading and sharing.

In this way, never again would a citizen of this great nation be subject to the stigma of not having seen/heard the latest hot movie/tv show/song. It would also encourage creativity with uses like mashups, re-edits, funny overdubs, etc.

Support Fair Use!

WebQuark?

[Doc Ruby]

I just saw a demo of a WYSIWYG, drag & drop Web page editor, where you drag around page elements: real text (with associated styler/editor) sections, images, video windows, all scaleable/positionable/stylabe. HTML is seen/touched only on demand, not to layout. It's written in JavaScript, .NET and connects live to a SQLServer backend for its library, including saved pages. It all runs in an unmodified Internet Explorer, without ActiveX, Java or other client-installed SW. They say the update for FireFox is almost ready, just bugfixes - not a plugin.

That's the kind of "HTML editor" I expected to see in common use literally a decade ago, by 1995. How come I don't see such things all over the place? Are they out there? Do I just need to get out more? Why aren't they a standard feature on every website with a content editing/creation feature for users?

Re:WebQuark?

[dmaxwell]

Does it generate clean HTML or will web devs have to clean up after this tool as well?

Cosmos 1 and failure

[FleaPlus]

Glenn Reynolds (i.e. the Instapundit) recently wrote a piece for Tech Central Station on the failure of the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1, which I thought was quite well-said. Here's a quote:

http://techcentralstation.com/062905J.html

Some might accuse [Planetary Society directory] Friedman of putting a Pollyannaish spin on things, but I'd say he's learned the most important lesson of all: It's hard to accomplish much if you're afraid to fail.

The history of success in all sorts of endeavors -- including the early days of space travel, when we were making rapid progress -- is a history of repeated failures. I don't think it's a coincidence that when the failure rate declined, so did our rate of progress. You learn from failure, and you learn from trying lots of different things. Unfortunately, fear of failure -- like fear in general -- is contagious. But fortunately, so is bravery. When people act unafraid of failure, other people may pick up on the message.

The Planetary Society's mission was, really, a failure: It was supposed to test solar sails, and it never got the chance. But, simply by happening, and by having the Planetary Society emerge with its head bloody, but unbowed, it accomplished something useful by opening up (metaphorical) space for others to try risky but low-cost approaches without worrying too much about the fallout. And that's good.

Because, as I've noted before, when you're not afraid of failure you can try lots of different things and figure out what works best. If you're afraid of failing, on the other hand, you build huge, process-laden, documentation-heavy, behemoths that -- in a way -- are already failures before they ever start because they're too hard to change and improve, and because they don't generate enough useful knowledge to allow further progress. (See, e.g., the Space Shuttle program).

The Planetary Society's launch, despite Lou Friedman's views, failed. But the approach it embodied is the only approach that's likely to achieve substantial success in the long run. And that's a kind of success in itself. Let's hope that we'll see more of this sort of thing in the future.

Maybe this is a victory of sorts?

[otter42]

I had the idea that we should found a small community and then declare copyrighted works public domain. Now of course you couldn't do that for everything, since major corps like Disney would shit lawyers on you, but you could declare eminent domain on all copyrighted works over 20 years-old. if anyone complains, you "reinstate" their copyright. For a fee.

The economic claim is not only simple, but real. Imagine now you can scan and digitally print those old photos of your grandparents, you can archive old books and movie, and you can adapt and derive with impunity. That's one magnificent cottage industry just waiting to be formed.

So maybe this USC decision will actually have a silver lining. Without doing anything quite so ridculous and doomed to failure as traing to seize a Supreme Court justice's house.