confused of calcutta

[With thanks to Ms Safka, and to Malcolm for alerting me to this story via his post here.]
[An aside: Would you believe Melanie turned 60 earlier this week? Happy belated birthday.]
In a HotNews post earlier today, Steve Jobs opened up (pun intended) with his views on DRM. Well worth a read. For me, the most [...]

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While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to [...]

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One of the key points made by Larry Lessig in his 23C3 speech is how code, once used solely to make things work, is now being used to make culture; as he says “the tools of creativity have become the tool of speech”.
When we hear statements like this, it’s important to experience them, not just [...]

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I don’t know about you, but I spend a fair amount of time looking at things that emerge from open source communities, be they free-as-in-freedom or free-as-in-gratis. At least one of the reasons I do so is to try and figure out what happens next. Agoramancy? Who knows. [For those who care about these things, [...]

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I used to smoke. And it didn’t matter how hard I tried to rationalise or defend my smoking, it all boiled down to one question.
Would I be happy to see my children smoke?

The answer never changed, it was always No. I should have learnt more quickly from that.
Sometimes we need simple questions to break through [...]

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What do you do when you’re told to take it very easy, when you’re told to make “slow” a polysyllabic word? If you’re me, and you also have a deep-seated protestant work ethic in you, you struggle. Big time.
Well, that’s what I did for a little while last month, struggling to get past the denial [...]

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