Learn to use the Scientific Method to deduce specific program behavior and to target, analyze, extract and modify specific operations of a program (mainly for purposes of interoperability).

File under: Information that could one day be illegal to posses (given the current direction of copyright reform).

Why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

A container game within an essay on metagames and containers.

“All the ways in which we build around and on top of our cre­ations greatly impact the way they’re used.

Bound­aries may not be phys­i­cal any­more, but they remain powerful.”

I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at the RRC Business and Applied Arts Conference entitled “Launching Your First Web Start-up”.

I’ll post the slides for the talk here tomorrow afternoon.

An API for LCBO store, product, and inventory information. Created by Carsten Nielsen but not affiliated with the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

John Nunemaker on Talent vs Practice via Giles Bowkett

“We are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly.” —Erik Naggum

Capitalism as communal risk management.

(Articles like this are best read using the Readability bookmarklet.)

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. [W]hen it is squandered through luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone, under the pressure of the ultimate necessity, before we were aware it was going.

So it is: the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” — Seneca the Younger

Release your source-code free and unencumbered into the public domain.

“The author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.”

It’s time for me to move away from CC Licenses and Unlicense all my publicly released code. I’ve been using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license but I no longer feel the need to force attribution and place non-commercial-use restrictions on my work.

I should probably do something similar for all my creative output (prose, poetry, photos, art, etc).

Five (naïve) assumptions we make about creative individuals:

1. Creative individuals would not produce their works without the possibility of making money from them.
2. Creative individuals are endowed with the inalienable right to control who may copy or modify those works, since without that “copyright” they would not be able to make money from their creative output.
3. Copyright is a straightforward extension of physical property rights and therefore a creative work is a form of intellectual property.
4. To protect the rights of creative individuals, governments may legitimately prevent others from copying or modifying creative works.
5. It is only government-enforced copyright that keeps a creative work safe from the ravages of violation and abuse; when it is no longer so protected, it lapses into a fearsome state of desuetude and disregard called the public domain.

Some of my favourites from Ebert’s list:

• Adaptation
• Almost Famous
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• Minority Report
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• Synecdoche, New York
• Waking Life

I would have added:

• (500) Days of Summer
• Amelie
• American Splendor
• A Scanner Darkly
• Before Sunset
• Big Fish
• Donnie Darko (original cut)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Ghost World
• L’auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Apartment)
• Lost in Translation
• LOTR Trilogy
• Memento
• Primer
• Spirited Away
• Wonder Boys

Surely I’m forgetting some…