Out of Cheese

Lilly has a good quote

Lilly has a good quote from Albert Einstein on her page. What she was doing looking up Einstein quotes at quarter of five in the morning is beyond me, but it's a good quote regardless.

Today's New York Times Magazine

Today's New York Times Magazine has a really interesting article on the differences between prescriptivist and descriptivist linguistics, the effect of computers on linguistic analysis, and an effort to build a corpus of actual usage of American English. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in linguistic research, or even just if you never realized that Joan Osborne's "What if God was one of us" is a misuse of the unreal conditional tense.

Josh Allen takes a broadside

Josh Allen takes a broadside against Larry Lessig: "Lessig is like Stallman; a collectivist opposed to individual property rights."

I don't think Allen understands Lessig's views at all. My understanding of Larry Lessig's writings and speeches is that he believes firmly in property rights...but that certain fundamental principles of our intellectual property system have been badly broken or ignored in recent years. Lessig doesn't have a problem with patents; he just has a problem with the failure of the patent system to avoid granting bad patents, particularly in software. He doesn't have a problem with copyrights; he just objects to the moves of Disney and others to extend the expiration of copyrights indefinitely.

Richard Stallman, on the other hand, doesn't believe in patents, copyrights, or other intellectual property protections in anything close to their current form. Other than a general belief that the current system needs to change, I doubt there's much on which he and Lessig agree.

Lessig's views are much closer to those of Tim O'Reilly, who wrote a terrific column last week explaining why the proposal to mandate that the government use open source software is not only absurd, but also contrary to many of the beliefs underlying the open source movement itself. I'm sure Lessig would agree.

mpt seems a bit down

mpt seems a bit down about his role in Mozilla UI design -- he's effectively the only real UI advocate in the entire project -- after seeing comments from Netscape's Peter Trudelle at CHI 2002.

Trudelle's comments are largely on target. Netscape didn't really know how to run an open-source project with a commercial implementation when it decided to release its source code. That was apparent to me when I interviewed with them for an internship a few years ago, and was one of the reasons why I spent that summer at Apple instead. They've come a long way, though, and these days they seem to have a better idea of how to manage the project and what their goals are. But they're still a bit short on UI design, and they'd do well to get mpt some help. Their best solution would probably be to have a regular Netscape employee join mpt to have someone in UI design who can make decisions that affect the commercial product, and probably a third person so they can have a real UI committee. I wish them luck, and I hope mpt sticks with it. They need him.

How Appealling links to a

How Appealling links to a New York Times story that shows an interesting side of the justice system. There's a murder case in Ohio in which the judge just refused to permit the prosecution to seek death penalty because he believed the county would face an unreasonable burden by paying for the public defense for a capital case. That's not the way the justice system is supposed to work. You'd think there would be a way for counties with larger budgets to subsidize the rare expensive cases in counties that can't afford them, beyond the current 50% state contribution mentioned in the article.