Category: Random

I grew up in Massachusetts, where the weather is unpredictable and changes regularly. I recall one March several years ago where one day I was walking around in shorts and two days later we had a huge snowfall. I’ve been conditioned to expect that sort of weather. Now I live in California, where the weather…

Tibet has been in the news recently, as people are using the fact that the Olympics are taking place in China to protest against Chinese control. I’ve never been to Tibet, and I don’t know very much about it. Tibetans are an ethnic group, they have a long history, they have their own religion, they…

Control over copying of analog data is, in practice, made possible by cost: it’s a pain to transcribe a book, it’s hard to make a perfect copy of a record. The cost of copying digital data, however, is near zero. This means that control over copying of digital data is, in practice, impossible. It’s not…

One of the best comic books being produced these days is, of all things, a zombie story. The Walking Dead is written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Charlie Adlard. The background is the basic zombie story as reimagined by George Romero: most of the people in the world have turned into zombies, and our…

The FCC spectrum auction is over and the anti-collusion restrictions have been lifted. I’m not going to say anything about what my employer did–I of course was not involved in the auction at all and I don’t know anything about it beyond the public announcements. But I wonder about the whole auction concept in the…