David Gessel
ACTA: Alliance for Covert Totalitarian Action
ACTA is apparently going into force this month, implementing still secret rules that will make everyone with an internet connection an international criminal in order to protect people with obsolete business models. Since the cost and value of publication, editorial review, and syndication have dropped to near zero thanks to the invention of broad direct distribution, the “recording” industry is obsolete. Why do we need an industry to make records when nobody buys records any more? The industry has changed business plans to extortion.
But the recording industry has historically made a lot of money and people with money hate giving it up and won’t do so without a fight. If the population won’t buy the recording industry’s products any more, choosing instead to shoulder the incremental cost of self-publication in a collaborative model, then the recording industry, naturally, turns to increasingly draconian efforts to preserve their revenue stream. It is far more cost-effective to co-opt the government and exploit public-funded investigatory and prosecutorial resources than to, say, pay private security to break into people’s houses and businesses: as a bonus working though the courts they can seize children’s college funds: keeping kids out of school means they won’t grow up to found competing industries. If there’s nobody left capable of innovating, there’s no point in the government enforcing that obsolete constitutional thing about “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.”
Peer-to-peer communications and especially self-publication technologies have always been a threat to the copyright industry. The DMCA was a huge victory for a dead industry and helped preserve it well beyond any economic utility at a tremendous cost to innovation and progress. But the copyright industry may still win a losing battle by shifting the cost of prosecuting civil infringement to the public and other industries by creating a new class of crime: not optimizing copyright industry profits.
Fight ACTA
https://www.eff.org/issues/acta
A week of tweets: 2010-08-29
- Congratulations Dr. Bill! #
- Small earthquake in Santa Monica just now. #
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/ci/10785197/us/index.html I love the did you feel it game. They should reward firsties. #
- Stored fare smart cards on a flat rate transit system are waste paper generators. Reusable tokens rule, charlie card drools. #
- interval research strikes from the grave! http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_15917028?source=rss&nclick_check=1 #
Tarmac BBQ
This is very cool. Some very nice late summer employee appreciation.
Working Toward Workable Time Zones
PIMs (Personal Information Managers, what we used to call things like Outlook, or Sunbird, or Lightning, or Zimbra before they were integrated with email) haven’t progressed much in the last 20 or so years. Actually, neither have email clients. Perhaps the most essential of our daily tools, these classes of products have failed to progress much at all over the decades.
Sure, email has styled text now and you can compose a message in Outlook using Word, but these wizzy tricks distract from the function of email–communicating the written word. There’s rarely any reason to style text in email and HTML mail has only been a boon for spammers and a distraction for users. One of the few useful enhancements is inline images which I do find useful.
The best email clients ever, Eudora and Mulberry (the BAT might qualify too, though I haven’t used it) have failed to keep up in OS level support. Thunderbird is OK, and pimped out with extensions to enable proper formatting, forwarding, text wrapping, etc. it is usable, though it still doesn’t handle frequent IMAP disconnections all that gracefully (it pains me to admit it, but only Outlook does this really well).
PIM functionality has actually gone backwards as the years have gone by. Calendar programs have always handled reminders and notifications and scheduled events fairly well. DateBook was great in 1990 and there’s very little useful that has been added since . In the mid-90’s Motorola shipped a great little PIM along with their TimePort phones called TrueSync Desktop. You could create an event in a time zone other than the one you were in. Wow. Amazing. The developers actually considered the possibility that you, the user, might have some business in a time zone other than the one you’re in. At the time, some people pointed to Outlook’s then “dual time zone” functionality as the be-all end-all. True, two time zones are better than one, but hardly a solution suitable for the whole of the US, let alone the world and the pixel heavy dual time zone stripe precluded anything more comprehensive. At the time, the official M$ work-around was to change your computer’s time zone to the time zone you wanted to create the event in, create the event, then change the time zone back. Brilliant.
Lightning (for Thunderbird) and Sunbird (stand alone) Calendar programs have finally incorporated some timezone functionality, you can at least set the starting and ending time zone of an event independently and differently from the time zone you’re in:
It is a start, but the time zone picker is still pretty much unusable:
This is a huge enhancement though, one I’ve been pushing for a long time:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224905
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364750
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364751
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364751
The right answer is a simple pop-up menu with my favorite time zones in it. I can use the semi-infinite list of seemingly random city names as a geography quiz along with Wikipedia to figure out what my favorite time zones are as long as I don’t have to spend 10 minutes scrolling through them every time I’m trying to find America/New York for ET or America/Los Angeles for PT (or America/Dawson Creek for MST, no DST).
Oddly, Lightning actually has a half-decent map view that shows you the time zone you’ve selected, but you can’t click on it to pick the time zone you want (!?):
I really like worldtimezone‘s view as a graphical picker:
Something like this, plus a search tool into a database of time zones for cities would be just perfect for creating my list of favorite time zones. Even the most worldly traveler is unlikely to need more than a dozen time zones in their favorites list and thus a popup would make selecting the start and end time zones very straight-forward. Way back at the start of 2007 I proposed something like:
Which is pretty much a copy of Starfish’s TrueSync Desktop (though TSD didn’t support different starting and ending time zones). Someday… maybe someday I’ll have a calendar program as advanced as they were in 1993.
UPDATE 2023:
It took about 7 years or so to finally get this into release Thunderbird, but time zones are now workable. Thanks devs! Open source software rocks.
Also, even more recently, we FINALLY got ISO 8601 (like, not quite standard since that requires an icky date/time delimiter rather than a readable ” “) time as a universally selectable date/time format. It took about 6 years, but has been a problem much longer. It is just that for a decade or so, one could select Denmark as a rational date structure and then that broke and we had stupid date formats for years until the devs put in an awesome fix.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1509096
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1426907
Lookin’ good!
A week of tweets: 2010-08-22
- Hertz LA running very full and slow lately. #
- At trueburger. Excellent but american cheese only is disappointing. Milkshake is better. #
Time Zones, how do they work?
Time Zones are a peeve of mine I’ve been trying to get sorted out for years. I’m not alone either, at least one rant has been cross-posted. The gist of the problem is embodied in the following:
You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30 am for next week at which time you’ll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you’re in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do.
Time zones are actually very easy to handle – and it is also easy to give reminders to people as to what time zone they are in all in one simple modification to the “new appointment” and “new task” dialogs: just add a start and end time zone for each that defaults to the current time zone the computer is in. Why both start and end? Because when you get on a plane you very frequently start in one time zone and end in another and airlines give you takeoff and landing times in the local time zones.
We’re using Zimbra ZCS these days, a pretty nice program, but they handle time zones worse than any modern program I’ve used. Hopefully they’ll fix it to something like this:
LinkedIn Phishing
I got a strange phishing message that pretended to be from LinkedIn. Not too bad as a facsimilie. Fortunately
the target domain ) is already shutdown (suspended for “spam abuse”)
Name Server:NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM
It appeared to be registered to a legit business and possibly a real name and email address, though unrelated to the LinkedIn request. Kind of a clever trick, but it probably would have lasted longer with CN registration, and perhaps if every link on the page didn’t point to the same destination.
A week of tweets: 2010-08-15
- P ? NP? If true – Good: banking may be safe. Bad: Salesmen never optimally routed. http://ova.st/pnp #
A week of tweets: 2010-08-08
- Up at 3:00am ET w/ @phragments & @bellastar11 for 2.5hr trip to JFK via A. Morning starts again in a few hours at LAX. #
- Omg! My FA is Kirsten Schaal!! (Not for realz, but in principal) #
A week of tweets: 2010-08-01
- RT @Percival: RT @DannyTRS: “Give a man a fire, he’s warm for the rest of the day. Set a man on fire, he’s warm for the rest of his life.” #
- http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20012253-245.html #