Archive for August, 2004

Wikipedia – putting the free in infreemation

Tuesday, August 31st, 2004

Speaking of free information. Wikipedia is a brilliant project which is just the start of an all encompassing encylopedia written by the people for the people. A wiki is a website which can be edited by the users leading to a democratic approach to building and managing content. The wiki method of ...

News of various import

Monday, August 30th, 2004

Peer to peer software ruled NOT LIABLE in the USA for copyright infringement activities of their users. Thank goodness some sense can be found here. Any useful tool can be used to ill purposes, we have been through the same issue with photocopiers and last I checked those companies ...

Issues with trade “liberalization”

Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

This is really big news: Wealthy countries brace for farming cuts as WTO makes historic step but is it good news? Historically, although North American agriculture cannot compete cost wise with cheap labour and production costs elsewhere, we have heavily subsidized these industries (especially in the US) to allow them ...

The Onion never fails to drive us to tears…

Saturday, August 14th, 2004

The Onion has written yet another doozie about George Bush's weblog. For those of you who do not know of The Onion and its place as a leader of satirical news reporting...do not fall into the trap that many have, as reported in this article from Wired: Onion Taken Seriously, Film ...

See in 4D and other cool visual stuff….

Thursday, August 5th, 2004

This site answers the age old question: "How Does One Obtain the Ability to 'See' in Four Spatial Dimensions?" Also in the do it yourself category, make your own posters with the Rasterbator: "Welcome to the Rasterbator - NOW IN COLOR!The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures ...

Infreemation Part 2 – the tragedy of the intellectual commons

Monday, August 2nd, 2004

Intellectual properties include copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets and mask works. (yes I needed to look that one up also!) The laws that govern such properties and their relationship to society were designed to foster investment in creativity and innovation since society would (arguably) be much less productive without the ...