be the change you want to see . . . updated

The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Cause your own effects
Got an email from a reader this morning � another polymath with a polyspecialized background, now sidetracked at midlife without any obvious career track. He wanted advice.
I wrote back: Start a blog.
I’ve been giving that advice for quite awhile now. A lot of people on the blogroll to the right are there because they took start-a-blog advice. This very blog was started at Dave’s insistence (advice wasn’t working, so he cranked it up a notch), back in October ’99.
Anyway, I was responding to this guy’s request by email when I decided to cut the last line and paste it over here. You can be the pinball or you can be the pinball machine. With a blog you can create your own machine.

sardine

mozdev.org – sardine: index

sardine allows the Mozilla user to apply customizations to all websites visited. The customizations are done by manipulating the DOM. All elements in the DOM, and all attributes of those elements can be manipulated. Any element can be changed to a different type, or hidden or an attribute removed, changed or added.

This looks interesting.

Possible applications/examples of sardine are:

* Turning off all JavaScript. (Disabling the <script> tag and onclick, etc attributes).
* Turning off all background images. (Disabling the background attribute of <body>).
* Converting blink tags into simple bold tags.
* Show non frame versions of websites. (Disable <frameset> tag).
* An ad filter. (Hide the <img> tag if its src attribute matches a certain regular expression pattern (ie. from a certain host)).

So you could apply your own display and/or security desires/requirements on any or all sites.

open source tithing

open source tithing

Stolen from John
How much time should one contribute toward the development of the open source software they use? The concept of tithing comes to mind. Just contribute 5 or 10 percent of the time that you use open source software (OSS).

Example: Suppose you use OSS every day, all day, to do your work. Now say you work 40 hours a week (stop laughing!). Maybe only half of that time is on the computer (whatever). So we’ve got 20 hours a week of usage. Just an hour or two a week meets your quota. While that doesn’t sound like much, there are a lot of users out there. Multiply!

Two hours a week proofreading or updating documentation, doing some performance tuning and sharing your findings, whatever. Remember, you don’t have to be a coder to help The Cause.

if the schools flunk, how can kids succeed?

CNN.com – Voucher students going back to public schools – Nov. 4, 2002

More than one in four students who took a voucher to attend private school in Florida this semester have transferred back to public education, a newspaper reported.
[ . . .. ]
Critics of vouchers, a cornerstone of the education policies implemented by Gov. Jeb Bush, said the returning students show that vouchers are misguided.

But a spokeswoman for Bush called the trend a triumph of school choice.

“No longer are these children trapped in failing schools,” Katie Muniz said. “Now they have a choice — and some prefer to stay in their home school. These were choices they never had before.”

Can anyone explain how the existence of failed schools is a triumph of any kind? It’s easy to take the position that their lack of ambition reflects the quality of their political leaders, but leaving that aside for the moment, I’d like to know why they return to schools that the state government itself claims are substandard. If they opt to go the voucher-funded route and then go back, why? Is it the lack of peers? A more rigorous curriculum? Did no one prepare them for this?

The real Adam Smith was in favor of competition

Lawrence Lessig

So if Smith is being principled, then properly stated, Smith’s principle comes down to this: That the government should not fund any research that results in code that some companies could not, consistent with their business model, adopt.

If that is his principle, then it follows that the government can’t fund projects that result in proprietary code (since there are some entities (say, the Free Software Foundation) that can’t, consistent with their business model, accept that code), or more radically, it means that the government can’t fund research that results in patents (since there are some business models that can’t pay the price of a patent). The only research the government could support, on this theory, is research that produces work in the public domain.That is an interesting but radical principle. The government funds all sorts of research that results in patents, and in proprietary code. So the real question for Congressman Smith is this: Does he believe the government can’t support proprietary or patented work if he believes it can’t support GPLd work? Is he advancing a principle, or just FUD about GPL[?]

If I had known this was what a career in law was all about, I might have gone that route: I just figured I’d end up spending a lot of time around criminals, and I was brought up better than that.

I think the horse is out of the barn on this one: NASA has been funding Linux driver development for years and IBM can bring its muscle to bear on the notion that corporations can coexist with the GPL.

Incidentally, I have looked on the MSFT packaging for the required mention of the Regents of the State of California, given WIN2k and XP used (and maybe still do use) the BSD networking implementation.