Steve Ballmer, the Monkey Man from Microsoft, proposed a while ago that PC makers should make computers that cost no more than 100 US$.
Now Slashdot reports that an outfit called SolarPC has taken up the gauntlet and produced Steve Ballmer’s $100 PC.
Of course, due to the prohibitive costs of popular operating systems, which shall remain nameless, because Steve Ballmer produces them, the pc is shipped with GNU/Linux.
There are two phases in the life span of a creative work, namely when the author has an interest in the work, and when he has lost interest in the work. There is more to it than that: there are different types of interest, interest may be rekindled, and one interest may be worth more to an author than the other. However, I do not think it is a stretch to state that interest is high near the creation of a work, and gets less as time progresses: the author, eventually, loses interest, and then he dies.
Copyright law is there for several reasons. Actually, if you are American, you believe it is only there for one reason: to protect the interest of the public. The author’s interests do not enter into it. At least, that’s the theory, modern US copyright law very much aims to protect the interests of authors, and especially those of publishers. (Don’t ask me how they got to be in the picture.)
In Europe, we believe that copyright, apart from incentivizing authors, is mainly there to reward authors, and because they gain a natural right by creating a work.
The interesting thing about copyright law, is that it more or less presumes the interests of the author to be unchangeable. Not only that, but it tries to protect these interests as if they are at their strongest.
Of course, the public loses out big time in this scenario. When an author has lost all interest in a work, the public is still not allowed to mix, rip and burn it.
There is, now and again, and I must admit this, a certain stuffiness to the public domain texts I help save at Project Gutenberg. Luckily, we have started making illustrated HTML versions since recently, which helps alleviate the stuffiness.
And sometimes, the pictures alone are worth it. If you look past the fact that the photos portray the Dutch in full blast sentimentalist touristy view, the kick-ass portraits in Door Holland met pen en camera (choose the HTML,None version) make the ebook well worth checking out.
(Surgeon General’s health warning: hair dressers are advised not to follow the above link, lest they die laughing.)
With all the talk about suborbital space ships, it’s easy to forget that the Russians were thinking of building a Soyuz replacement, but lacked the money. Projected costs were around 300 million US$, IIRC, which is still said to be cheaper than a single space shuttle launch. (A Soyuz launch is rumoured to cost around 20 million US$, but only seats three–the Kliper can take six or seven people into orbit and beyond.)
Well, it seems that money has been found, and the building is underway. A press release from the Russian space agency has pictures. I did not realize this thing actually has a door!
The Kliper builders are not the only ones short of cash. Wired Magazine discusses how American builders of sub-orbital space planes and rockets have to angle for money, and how they look to filthy rich sugar daddies like Paul Allen and Richard Branson to hand it over. This got me thinking; in the Middle East, there are plenty of wealthy oil sheiks who have no idea what to do with their money. Why don’t they invest it in the Kliper? After the Space Shuttle has been phased out, the Kliper will for a time be the only ship capable of bringing people into orbit, so that would seem a sound investment. Also, it would give them a chance to build their own space port–Dubai is a fair bit closer to the equator than Kazakhstan.
(Link now dead) (Now alive again) The http://www.starz.com/se/features/hareraising/texaschainsaw.htmlTexas Chainsaw Massacre in 30 Seconds, Re-enacted by Bunnies.
Cool clocks made of found objects.
Via BoingBoing.
(Or perhaps I have understood this VBDK thing; should it only be NSFW?)
Apparently, this has been around for awhile, but I liked it, so will repeat it: after hearing that the White House cancelled a tea for poets, because some of them were going to (gasp! shock! horror!) protest the war in Iraq, Julia Alvarez wrote “The White House Has Disinvited the Poets”.
OK, go to http://www.livejournal.com/users/skiv/330081.html and look at the pretty pictures without looking at the text (which shouldn’t be hard if you cannot read Cyrillic).
Cyrillic rhymes with idyllic, so what do think these nice pictures are about?
It is a book for children about the ecessity-nay of axes-tay!
Neil Barron’s bibliography Horror Literature describes it as follows: “Mystery story about a man who must continually renew his health and vitality by draining the vital energy of others. Often compared to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it is more closely related to stories of psychic vampirism, and in allowing the psychic vampire to give his own side of the story it anticipates such modern exercises in vampire existentialism as Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry.“
That sounds like a description of every third or fourth Star Trek episode to me, but Master of his Fate by J. Maclaren Cobban was written long before Gene Roddenberry was a glint in the eyes of his parents.
(I helped re-produce this book for Project Gutenberg for Distributed Proofreader’s Halloween proofathon. Available as ‘plain vanilla text’ and HTML.)