Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can't be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage. There's more:
Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."It's not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:
The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson's own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the "disclosures" about expert witness testimony, wrote that "all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days."Read the whole thing, it's even crazier than you think. Before it's all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow. UPDATE: Here's some more from The Register.]]>
History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]>
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off." The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.How dare he.]]>
A very feminine and elegant woman’s line with a little edge and a lot of versatility. “For my current collection, I imagined a really well-packed suitcase,†she explains. “I wanted the pieces to function together and fit a woman’s daily transition as she leaves the house in the morning, goes to work and goes out afterward.†Utilizing a casual wool fabric, Bennett innovatively creates jumpers; soft, flowing dresses; and flattering tops that look chic in any setting. And, unlike most multipurpose items, each piece has a surprising touch, like hidden pockets or a cozy silk lining. “I like to give the wearer a hidden luxury—it’s a nice secret for her to have.â€
She does really amazing things with the cloth, like this:
[caption id="attachment_5021" align="alignnone" width="160" caption="a Miranda dress"]
[/caption]Go forth and purchase.
]]>